I had to stay home sick from work yesterday with another brutal headache. I’ve pretty much got my headache issues narrowed down to a specific time of month… yes, that time of month. I googled period headache and the Internet asked me, “Did you mean menstrual migraine?” Uh, yeah, sure? I’m hoping to have the issue worked out soon so that I never have to mention it again because it makes me feel like a 1950s advertisement.

Anyway, that’s not what this story is about, it’s just a set up for why I was lounging on the couch on a weekday. It was around 9 am and I had settled into my couch spot to spend my day oscillating between the computer and thinking about ways to end the headache. Stabbing an ice pick into my eye is basically all I can ever come up with. I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye just a few inches from my slumped head. With wicked headaches, you figure it was just a tracer, or some other devil come to take you home. After a second or two, though, I realize it was not a hallucination, it was a small crab.

Wait, a small crab? I’m nowhere near the ocean? Yeah, it was this big bad mother effer.

This was my first Austin scorpion. We had them every once in a while when I was growing up in Boyd, but they were always pretty small and I had a mother available to deal with the situation. There’s no perspective in the picture, but he was a solid two inches long. It was pretty easy to catch him in comparison to the genetically modified cockroaches we have to deal with in this city, minimal screaming and throwing of plastic receptacles, but still not a great experience. And, this is yet another experience where I don’t understand why there isn’t an automated solution yet. I know they make some kind of bug-specific vacuum you can buy… but I want this to have advanced to the point where if I see a bug of nefarious nature, I can shoot a beam out of my eye and evaporate that son of a bitch.

Anyway, you would think that story would end right there, but the plot thickens when PJ says he has to leave for work and he isn’t going to flush our new friend because it’s technically an arachnid and everybody knows it’s bad luck to kill spiders.

So, long story short, he left the scorpion in a plastic tub for me to stare at all day. I obviously wasn’t going to flush it after being told it would bring a plague upon our HOUSES. I ended up giving it a piece of grass midway through the day because it wasn’t moving and seemed very depressed. It hid itself in the grass and I thought it had escaped… so gross.

PJ ended up getting home from work while I was running an errand and he took it to the countryside (city drainage ditch where he promises no children play). I didn’t get to say goodbye.