I do want to tell some stories about this vacation, but that would involve adding pictures, and have I mentioned how draining it is to upload pictures to this site? I don’t have that kind of energy. Some people at work were giving me a hard time for coming back from vacation on a Thursday (why not take the rest of the week off and come back on Monday?), and while I see their point, it’s totally awesome to go back to work on a Thursday. Two-day work week! The weekend is right around the corner. And as fun as that vacation was (it was totally fun), I’m very glad to be home. I love my bed. And my dogs. And my kitchen. Well, I don’t love my kitchen, but it’s bigger than what we were working with in Georgia. Not that I spent much time in it.
Okay, maybe this is going to be a little bit of a vacation post. I was reading The Bloggess just now, and of course I’m laughing hysterically at today’s post (that should totally go without saying), and I had a similar experience over the weekend, and then I started writing the story in my head, so here it is.
Background: My family (Mom, Dad, brother, sister, me, assorted spouses, and one almost 5-year-old) decided to stay in a cabin in the mountains in northwest Georgia for a few days. In the mountains. In the woods. Not in a clearing in the woods. In the woods. With me? Okay. ‘Cause this will become important. John and I were supposed to arrive just before midnight Friday night (fly into Atlanta, rent a car, drive an hour and a half), but our flight was delayed (a lot) and then, only about 7 miles from the place, the road was blocked by a police cruiser because the power company was removing a tree from the power lines. After about 20 minutes of sitting there (no map, no Internet connection to find a map), I finally asked the cop if there was another way to get where we were going. There was, of course, and we finally got to the house. In the woods. At about 2:30 in the morning. Oh, after we pulled into the wrong driveway. ‘Cause it was a gravel road that was more of a track up the mountain. In the very deepest dark. Because it was in the woods! And the power was out. Dad met us at the right driveway with a flashlight and helped us get inside (where there were no lights, because the power was out) and find our bedroom. With a flashlight. Because there was no power. Being up the mountain meant we were using well water, which gets into the house via pump. Which totally doesn’t work when there’s no power. So, you know, no flushing. And bottled water for brushing teeth and washing faces and hands. NO POWER! But we were ready to collapse into bed (a bed we never collapsed into again after that night – I promise I’m getting to the point) when the power came back on, and so did every light in the house. Anyway, most of that background was not really necessary, but let’s just say it illustrates how tired and ready for bed we were the next night, having only gotten about 5 hours of sleep the night before.
I was washing my face in the bathroom when I heard a very loud, somewhat shocked “JESUS CHRIST!” from the bedroom. I came running and found John standing about three feet away from the foot of the bed, kinda pointing towards the pillow. “There’s a scorpion. IN the bed.” “Can’t be. Scorpions don’t live in Georgia, they live in Texas and New Mexico and deserts and stuff.” “Zannah, it was a scorpion. Go look.” “Um, no.” He twitched the covers a little and I saw something scurry under his pillow. I got a little closer and saw it come out from under the pillow and go upside down under the mattress. Kinda looked like a scorpion to me, but I wasn’t about to get close enough to really look. Besides, it couldn’t be. Either way, though, I didn’t want it in the bed. John was pretty freaked out, and I wasn’t brave enough to get it, so I ran upstairs and grabbed Corey before he disappeared into his room. Normally, I’m the one who finds the big ugly bug, and I’m the one who completely freaks out. John walks into the situation knowing what to expect (I’ve already shrieked about the bug), so he’s usually able to handle it fairly calmly. This time, he was the one who found it after nearly LAYING DOWN ON TOP OF IT, so I think he was well within his rights to be a little less than rational. Anyway, big brother came down, we both grabbed shoes, and I helped him lift up the mattress so he could WHACK the damn thing dead. And then he put it in a plastic bag to show every person who came to the house over the next few days. ‘Cause he’s a boy. Thanks, Cor, for killing the scorpion! After Corey left (with the scorpion, which he left on the table for everyone to find at breakfast), John and I discussed whether or not we’d be able to sleep in that bed. I was actually fairly okay with it, I think because I’m not the one who found it, whereas all those other times I have been the one surprised by the spider or the centipede, I can’t sleep because of all the creepy-crawly nightmares. According to John, that kind of inconsistency is one of my most endearing (or is that infuriating?) qualities. Anyway, we did a thorough search of the room and the bed, checked all of the blankets, all of the sheets, took the pillows out of the pillowcases so we could shake them out, lifted up the mattress again, looked under the bed with the flashlight, then checked the drooping fabric underneath the box spring just in case they were nesting (isn’t that something you’ve heard of? A nest of scorpions? Maybe that’s vipers…), and when we didn’t find anything, we decided it was time to go to bed. Gingerly. And without much sleep. Every night after that, we did the same bed check.
After the scorpion IN THE BED, the spiderwebs that apparently only took 10 minutes to string up across every doorway and sidewalk, and the millipede on the wall over our bed the last night (I called Dad to rescue us from that one), John and I have decided that although we like the idea of having a house in the woods, the woods will totally have to keep their distance. Nature (the buggy part, at least) is not for me.
(I counted six, which I totally (seven) put in on purpose. For reals. Think I can go higher next time?)