Alligators, Snakes, Scorpions, Cockroaches, and Fire Ants or Things You'll Find In Florida Everyday

My friend contacted me to tell me of something horrific that happened to him. He was studying at his desk when he felt something crawling on his leg. Now, my friend lives in a new, very upscale apartment community in the Orlando area. He brushed off what was on his leg and caught a quick glimpse of it. What he saw horrified him. He ran and got a can of Raid and the hunt was on. Having armed himself, he frantically knocked things over while he scrambled to find it. With the prey in his sights, he opened fire and the beast was done. My friend had killed a scorpion.

Being unaccustomed to scorpions crawling on him or sharing his home with them, he began to search the Internet to see what kind of scorpion it was. He determined it to be a Florida Wood Scorpion and took its corpse to his rental office to explain that he had an infestation of the gravest kind. They did not seem very shocked at the office and informed him that the beast was not poisonous. That did very little to ease his mind, nor mine. I informed him that for all of my future visits, I would be staying at his girlfriend's place where the overwhelming amounts of estrogenical toxicity caused by said girlfriend and her gang of roommates would prove most inhospitable to scorpions and any other such creatures. Potpourri and other accoutrements, I sincerely hope, should prove lethal.

Yes, sunny Florida, the place that people in colder climes dream of escaping to. What people do not realize of this supposed paradise is that there are mosquitoes, fire ants, alligators, criminals, rednecks, boat people, snakes, and now scorpions in abundance down here. Behind my house there is a lake. Every year you'd see ducks and their hatchlings swimming in the lake. Every week there would be however many less ducklings swimming behind their parents. Sometimes there'd be a missing parent. Do you know why? Alligators would eat them. How do I know? Because walking on the shore of the lake you'd see ducks that had been bitten in half. In Florida you hear of dogs and little children walking up to a water body and an alligator grabbing them for a tasty treat. It's tragic, but not uncommon here.

The alligators use the sewer pipes as a highway system to end up in all different parts of town. One time at work, an office wide email went out warning us to be careful in the parking lot as gators had been spotted. I thought it was a joke until the following day when a poster had been set up near the office entrance showing deputies posing with the alligators captured in the office parking lot. It just goes to show that you don't have to be in the wilderness to be Crocodile Dundee here in Florida.

I need to escape this place and either return North or back across the ocean. I do not like he beach. I do not like the heat. I do not like sweating. I do not need alligators, scorpions, snakes, and fire ants. I am not Indiana Jones!