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* OUCH do not recommend. Like a rookie fool, I’d omitted to check my boots for crawlies before putting’em on. About a quarter mile into my hike I detected a horrible, sharp pain in my foot. Pulled off the boot, expecting a piddly little scorpion. Butnno. It was a goddam *Scolopendra heros*, a Giant Texas Centipede.
Reader, it takes a lot to squick me out, but I have no stomach for giant centipedes. They’re just too goddang big, are too venomous, and have too many fucking legs.
Gripped with pain and irrational panic, I screamed like a city girl, splatted my ass down on the rain-soaked dirt, and pulled off my centipede-encrusted sock in about .04 seconds (the dog nose in the photo belongs to my feral Pomeranian, who enjoyed every second of this embarrassing display a little too much). I then defeatedly limped home in the rain, rapidly losing feeling in my big toe. It took about 5 hours for the pain to subside. These fucken things are no joke. Although, like all my doofy encounters with creepy wildlife, the tableau was comical AF.
** It’d been so long since I’d driven my own car off the farm that a colony of paper wasps had had time to build a whole-ass nest in the space between my driver’s side door and the fender.
I’d boarded the car without incident and driven into town, not having noticed the nest. Did my errand. But upon my return to the car, the wasps were by now kinda cheesed off. To my enormous surprise, an entire buttload of sting-y insects buzzed out of my car door at once and bounced into my face.
Pretty sure I did some hilarious and awkward anti-wasp-swarm moves in the parking lot while attempting to cognitively reconcile this unnatural state of affairs with any possible reality. It was only then that I noticed the nest and grasped the gist. When I got home (unstung, by some miracle), there were a bunch of panicked wasps buzzing around the carport, searching for their recent nest. So many of their compatriots had flown off in that parking lot 8 miles away! It was an emotional rollercoaster for all concerned.
