Scorpio!

For a while there, just after it got dark, we could see the constellation of Scorpius really clearly on the Western horizon from the porch of the house. It was bright, obvious, harmless, and helped me learn to find Saggitarius.

None of these things were true about this guy:

...who I found on the porch, lurking under my rain boot as I prepared to go to the computer lab at 8am this morning. I "found" him using a sophisticated technique wherein I reached for my rain boot and, with the lightning-quick reflexes that have elevated my species to the top of the food chain, extracted the poison from his barb with the pad of my left ring finger. That's the finger on which I wear my wedding ring, so I knew he'd go for it -- scorpions are notorious romantics.

So then I said "Shit! Fuck! God damn it!" and went back in the house.

Bridget hates it when I walk back into the house shouting obscenities for no apparent reason, because she always expects that something Really Bad has happened (decapitated student, black mamba bite, government overthrown by military coup), but usually I've just forgotten to bring some mildly-important piece of paper with me.

But this time I was shouting obscenities because I'd been stung by a scorpion. I wasn't shouting because of the pain (which hadn't started yet) but because literally one minute earlier I had made a joke wherein I predicted that our rain boots, so long unused, had probably been colonized by giant, mutant, hybridized Spider/Scorpions in the interim -- and that I'd better shake them out extra-well and be prepared to do battle. It was a classic early-morning not-very-funny joke that seemed funnier because we had only just had our coffee and our brains were only functioning at the level of like gibbons.

Which is how I explain going from joking about scorpions to being stung by one in under 60 seconds. Under-caffeinated gibbon-brain.

To be fair, I had already assiduously checked and shaken and banged around my first boot, and was satisfied that it remained uncolonized by arachnids. I was about to repeat this procedure with boot #2 but the sly scorpion seen above, probably awakened by and in a state of high alertness as a result of the banging and shaking of boot #1, got all UNDER the boot instead of inside it.

Anyway, one trip to the clinic and almost 10 hours later, it still hurts, but I have to assume it hurts less than it would have without the local shot of lidocaine to the sting site, the IV shot of hydrocortisone, the Aleve, and the Panadol.

The guy above is dead, by the way. My mercy has its limits. (Not really. I just wanted to bring his carcass to the clinic so they could see what had got me.)