sweasel.com

Living in AZ is nice.

We’re leaving monsoon season so the only insects I’ll see until next July are scorpions.

Well, maybe “nice” isn’t the word.
And no, I don’t care if scorpions are not insects. They have too many legs to be anything else.

I had one of those come into my room last night *shudder*…won’t be hearing from him anymore. Thanks for putting a name to them, I always just called them giant mosquitoes.

It was an awful hot and humid summer…can’t wait till the first killing frost and the nice leaves of fall.

Boo-Hiss on scorpions. A fly-swatter won’t do. I swear to you one tipped over a toilet plunger in my bathroom, that I had plopped down over it while I searched for something to kill it with. After I killed the third one in my bathroom, I started investigating and found a huge hole under the vanity. I bought a can expanding/hardening spray foam insecticide to fill up the hole. Shit—Scorpions make me cuss.

Probably more than you wanted to know about the devilish workings of harvestman’s pedipalps –

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/daddy-long-legs-harvestmen-glue-catch-prey/

About a year ago, Amazon offered Defoe’s “Journal of a Plague Year” (Kindle edition) at no cost, so I downloaded and read it. It wasn’t as dry as I’d expected, and though I wondered how the wandering narrator escaped falling victim to the contagion, himself, it didn’t dawn on me that the book was a fictionalized account of the epidemic.

Good article, Stoaty!

My mother moved at age 12 from the wild prairie of western Canada to near Orlando, FL. This was in about 1928, mind you: no Disneyworld or air conditioning. They lived in the country. She told me, “The first thing we learned was to shake out our shoes in the morning.”

Me: “Why?”

Her: “Scorpions.”

My mother grew up in Texas. For her, it was bathrobes and boots.

I’m in the top 10% of the arachnophobia class, but daddy longlegs and crane flies never really got me ‘triggered’ (I keep up with the cool kid lingo). It’s those jumpy, stout, muscular ones that freak me out.

Specially the ones that turn round and watch you as you figure an angle for the kill.

Scorpions? Kill with extreme prejudice.

I’m the exact opposite. Spiders bother me not in the slightest, even the really freaking enormous ones we get in Costa Rica, but I would always make sure that terminating daddy longlegs* with extreme, maniacal prejudice was an instant and overriding priority if one of them hove into view. I hate them, hate them, hate them.

* UK version