Stupid is as stupid does

Tonight I did something colossally stupid.

I stuck my hands in a pair of gloves that had been laying on the windowsill outside the door for the last week or two.

I know better than to do this. I grew up in the Deep South, where you check under just about everything for venomous snakes, not to mention black widow and brown recluse spiders. You check your shoes, you check your gloves. You don't stick you hand in some place you haven't already checked.

And just my luck, there was a scorpion in the left glove. A striped bark scorpion, to be exact. He stung me right on the webbing between my index and middle finger before I could get my hand out of the glove. And by stung, I mean he got me good.

I've never been stung by a scorpion before, but let me tell you it is not a fun thing. The initial pain is far beyond a bee sting - in fact, I ran back in the house holding my hand (I'd yanked the glove off) and yelling for my husband to come see what was in my glove. I washed the site with soap and water, then grabbed an ice pack, and headed out the back door in time to see the hubby shake the scorpion out of my glove. I stomped the sucker to death, then invited a chicken over to dine on the corpse. Revenge is sweet, if somewhat fleeting.

Since we were working outside this evening, I kept a cold cloth on my hand since it significantly reduced the pain. After a few minutes, a tingling/numb sensation set in around the sting site, about halfway up my index and middle finger, and along the back of my hand. Four hours later, the area is still painful and tingling, and it's a little colder than the surrounding skin.

Fortunately, I'm not allergic to scorpions,and didn't have any shortness of breath, dizziness, or other associated symptoms. However, let me tell you, I will NOT be blindly sticking my hands into any gloves without carefully inspecting them first, and I will be carefully checking over other things as well. There are plenty of scorpions in this part of Texas - we'd seen them outside when we were demolishing the front brick columns - so I need to be more aware and more careful.

To top things off, I found another one of the little buggers under the sink while I was cooking dinner. He's dead, too. And while I really don't like using pesticides, especially with the dogs, kids, and chickens, we may need to exterminate. Scorpions are just... *shudder*. Well, you get the idea.