Third Time's the Charm

I made many trips up and down the stairs today. I was putting my craft room back to rights and apparently that included a free stairs workout. (Downstairs with giveaways, upstairs with tape. Downstairs with trash, upstairs with water.) And all day long, I kept seeing this weird black thing on one of the steps. Too dark to be cat hair, too small to be a hairball. And all day I kept wondering what it was and hurrying past it because I was a woman on a mission.

So when it caught my eye again as I was headed upstairs after dinner, I stopped to take a closer look.



Oh, you can't quite see it?



Yup. Absolutely, positively, yet another scorpion.

I figured it was dead. I mean, it had been sitting in the same spot, exactly halfway up our staircase, all day long. Surely it was dead. Right?

Yea, um, no. When my husband fetched a broom and dustpan and tried to sweep it up? It ran away. After much poking and prodding, he managed to sweep it up and evict it from the premise.

This one was smaller than either of the previous two. But it was also the first not found in the kitchen. And, oh hey, by the way, how in the heck does a scorpion not longer than my thumb manage to climb halfway up a staircase?!