Always check your pants

I was listening to the radio on my way to work this morning and heard the end of a conversation about this story. The dj's were asking people to call in and tell them about weird animals or bugs they had found in their houses. People were calling in with all kinds of odd tales (ha) of creepies and crawlies that had gotten into their living spaces and all of a sudden I was shot back to my freshman year of college and the terrible, horrible day I didn't check my pants.

My freshman year was spent mostly hanging around my aunt and uncle's rental home on the golf course off Lake McQueeney. I was mopey and sad and angry all the time and being at their house was my way of getting away from "stupid, crappy Seguin" and being with people who loved me for the shitty pouty 18 year-old I was.

I always did my laundry there (or Uncle Chip would do it for me...hehe) and would end up spending the night because I would stay so late getting it done. I would fold my cleaned and dried clothes and stack them back into my laundry basket until that was full and then I would stack the folded clothes on the floor next to the basket.

BAD IDEA.

I woke up one morning and went to put on a pair of jeans I had washed the night before. I grabbed them from the bottom of the stack of clothes sitting on the floor and took them into the bathroom. I slipped my legs into the jeans and was zipping them up when I felt something on my right thigh. I shook my leg a little and IT moved down to my calf. All the hair on my body was standing on end by this point and I was frantically shaking my entire lower half, trying to get whatever IT was the hell off my leg. I was obviously screaming because I could hear my aunt asking if I was ok from the other side of the bathroom door.

Finally, after the longest 5 seconds of my life, I gave one last panicked shake of my leg and out flew the offending THING.

It was a SCORPION.

A SCORPION was in my pants.

It looked like this.

After stripping the rest of my clothes off and jumping into the shower to rid myself of any other scorpions that might have taken up residence on my person, I went through each article of clothing that had been stacked on the ground and shook it like a maniac to make sure no other scorpions were hiding out, waiting to attack me. There were none.

The pants scorpion was squashed (sorry, Right to Life bug activists) and some obsessive research was done on my end. Apparently the type of scorpion that had camped out in my jeans was pretty common in Texas (shudder) and they all like dark, warm places, like piles of clothes just out of the dryer. It wasn't a particularly poisonous type of scorpion, but the articles I read stated that the sting could be pretty painful. Bullet dodged.

After that horrifying experience, I went through a phase where I would leave NOTHING on the floor, not even my shoes. I moved everything in my dorm room up as high as I could get it and put piles of folded laundry on the counters in my aunt and uncle's house. I started warning my friends to check their pants when they put them on. I got laughed at a lot for that, but guess who has never found another scorpion in her jeans?

THIS GIRL.