Yikes, did you ever bring back a "bad" memory to my mind.

I used to live in Arizona..and we had everything from Black widows, to scorpions, to snakes invading our house. I remember one time my ex-husband reached into the windowsill and came back w/a bite from a black widow. Emergency trip to the hospital and nearly 24 hours later he was fine.

Ex-husband would be out doing yard work and I'd hear screaming. I'd run out to see what was wrong and he's in the middle of the yard holding his leg and yelling for me to take his pants off. He'd strip down to chase scorpions out of his pants.

Then.. there was the time that I was sitting on the toilet, the tp was out, [of course] and I reached into the cupboard to get a new roll. But, sitting coiled up on the new roll of tp was a SNAKE!!!! Of course, later on I heard that it was a gopher snake or something similar, but to me, at that moment, it looked and acted like a rattlesnake and I wasn't going to stop and ask questions. I screamed and yelled and ran out of that bathroom so fast you'd think I'd caught fire!

Now I live in Florida and so far, the only critter to invade the home is lizards. They're not so bad, gives my heart a little start when I see one, but more than likely, they get in the house then starve to death. There's nothing like moving an end table or the sofa and finding dried up lizard carcasses.

The squirrels are a menace.. especially to our Christmas lights. We used to outline the house in white lights every year, but we've since stopped doing that. The squirrels would eat through the string of lights and short out a section so the house was always "un - outlined" in one area or another. As fast as my husband could repair a string of lights they'd eat through another or eat through the same one. They won that battle. Now we just decorate the yard.