I'm Chia Wald and this is my blog. Here is where I share my thoughts and my art. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it isn't. That's life... and that's me. 
This is my neighbor’s row of Oleander bushes. It use to be a nice neat hedge but then the neighbors moved. The new neighbors didn’t want to trim the bushes because they didn’t want to cut off any of the pretty flowers. We weren’t too happy but then they moved and we got more new neighbors. Our newest neighbors seem like they don’t know a lot about owning a home and maintaining the yard.
Back in January we had a hard frost and a lot of plants lost their leaves. The Oleanders were looking pretty sad with most of their leaves piled up on the ground beneath them. I kept telling Recliner Man that he should trim the side that faces us and pull all the debris out from under them but he said, “If I do that the new neighbors will never learn how to do it for themselves.” I think there was a ball game on TV.
Last week the new neighbors finally hired a landscaper to come out and clean the mess up. He didn’t do much pruning because they are so overgrown that it will take several small cuts to get them back into shape, but he did clean out the mess underneath them. This made me very happy.
My happiness had a bittersweetness to it… cleaning up the bushes meant dislocating a lot of scorpions. We found 4 of them in the house in the days immediately following the clean up. That’s as many as we have ever found in an entire year. Some years we don’t find any inside. That probably doesn’t mean they aren’t in here. It just means they are sneaky little monsters.
Today Recliner Man was outside hosing off the patio and he disturbed a couple of scorpions. This one tried to make a run for it up the side of our house:
They are really creepy looking, aren’t they? You should see them run. With all those legs they are kind of like a centipede and look like they are just floating They float really fast.
This one was the largest one I have seen. He really creeped me out.
Lucky for me Recliner Man has the awesome ability to step away from the TV and become Bug Man. It was Bug Man to the rescue and that nasty old bug didn’t stand a chance. I love you Bug Man, you always come running to save me from spiders and scorpions!
Some day I’ll tell you about our spiders, they’re Black Widows. Ewwwww!
Stumble it!
5 responses so far ↓
1 Judy B. // Nov 1, 2007 at 2:37 pm
ICK!!! May I NEVER see a scorpion in my house! A friend showed me the scorpions trapped on the sticky bug trap she puts by her front door. EEWW!! Makes me want to run!
2 chia // Nov 1, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Judy, You’ve never seen one in the house? How long have you lived here?
Last week a local friend asked me if I’d been stung by a scorpion yet. I found it very interesting that she said, “yet.”
3 Ocotillo // Apr 13, 2008 at 8:05 am
[…] the tree trying to grow into our Ocotillo? It belongs to the neighbors with the Oleander hedge. They don’t seem to be into outdoor activity very much. They only trimmed their hedge once. […]
4 Kira // Apr 13, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I HATE scorpions. They sneak in and drop on us from the ceiling fans…once one landed in my bed while I was it, without my glasses, so I couldn’t see which way the sucker was headed. I’ve never moved so fast in my life!
Luckily we haven’t seen any indoors since we moved from that old house, but yick.
Bad scorpions. Yay Recliner Man for killing them!
5 chia // Apr 13, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I’ve heard other people talk about them dropping down on them. I’m always a little worried because the AC/heat vent is right over my bed.
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