In the 'You Can Never Really Totally Relax Here' Category...

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging to bring you this special report...

Dateline:  20 April 2014

We discovered that we have an olive tree in our yard and so we thought we'd try our hand at brining some, to see how they come out.  Bex! isn't big into pickled foods so we're trying a salt brine to start.

We harvested some olives and cleaned out an empty peanut butter jar.  We slit the olives length wise, which was a helpful tip we found online.  After shaking the jar to dissolve the salt, we filled it up with what will hopefully in a few weeks' time be a special treat for us.

Bex! decided she wanted to document this little culinary experiment, so she went to get  her camera.  She unsnapped her camera bag, pulled out her camera - the strap was all bundled up around her camera, her hand and her arm.  As she untangled the strap she felt something moving on her forearm and as she moved, she heard a 'plop' as this little cutie fell on the floor - 

This dude was about six inches long and mean as hell.  By far, the largest scorpion we've seen here.  I killed a brown one in the sink last week - he was only about 4".  We're told by our Merida friends that the brown ones will make you feel crappy but the black ones are very dangerous.  Getting zapped by one of them means an automatic trip to the hospital.  

Fortunately, there was no sting and I dispatched this diablo with one smack o' my chinela (flipflop).  Then we did a thorough top-to-bottom house inspection until we were satisfied this one was working alone.

All's well that ends well.

We now return you to you regularly scheduled blog posts.