Country life vs. City life..

We all know that city living vs. country living has many differences...right?  There are pros and cons for both.  For one, city living usually involves lots of neighbors, traffic zooming by your house at all hours of the day or night...zero privacy (again..neighbors) and always seeing people walking their dogs, kids...or both, and more than likely these dogs are on leashes.  Occassionally, you will even see children on leashes (!)  I never used leashes for my children when they were smaller, but I do remember seeing parents walking their kids with those harness/leash things...I never understood that, but that's just me... 
And country living of course, is the complete opposite.  My dog seriously has only worn his leash once since moving here.  We all have more freedom at this house than ever before...now don't get me wrong...we don't party like rock stars or anything like that, although if we chose to be it would totally be ok..... but we can now play our music a little bit louder without worrying about the neighbors getting upset.  We can build a fire outside (controlled, of course!) and now that it's summer, we can be outside (with our NOTSOLOUD music) without anyone caring about the noise (:
Country living does have more wildlife than you would see in the city, that's for sure!  We have seen lots of critters living here.  I posted about this visitor  a couple days ago and I wrote of how our neighbor killed and disposed of it....yesterday, we caught a mouse and yes, THAT was also killed and disposed of.
Tonight, Tita had just finished showering and was in her room getting her pajamas on and combing her hair.  I was finishing up sewing my kitchen curtains and Marko and Armando were watching TV.  Pretty soon I heard Tita scream for Marko and quite honestly, didn't think much of it because Miss Gabriella can be quite a drama queen sometimes.  Right after that, both of the kids came to me with eyes W-I-D-E  O-P-E-N and super freaked out.  Tita told me of how she was sitting on her floor combing her hair in front of a mirror and she saw "Something I have NEVER seen before IN MY LIFE!"  Armando and I went to investigate and I walked into her room and was carefully moving her comb and wet towel out of the way and I made sure to shake the towel in case "whateveritwas" had crawled onto the towel.  Tita said that it was under the lid of a fabric zebra box she has in her room.  In the meantime, Armando is standing next to me with a couple paper towels to grab "whateveritis."  Sure enough!  I removed the lid and "whateveritis" crawled ran PRETTY DARNED FAST  took off like a bat out of hell down the side of the box and onto the floor.  Armando went to grab it as fast as he could while I'm yelling (and I'm NOT kidding!)  "DON'T SQUISH IT BECAUSE I HAVE TO IDENTIFY IT!!!!!!!!!"  Well we all followed him into the bathroom  and he puts it down on the bathroom counter.  I really don't know HOW he did it, but he didn't squish it!  And I'm SO glad HE caught it because I KNOW I would have squished it bad and then I would not have been able to identify it!!  Here are some pictures of "whateveritwas":

 Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!  PRETTY CREEPY...RIGHT??!!

By now, the kids AND Armando are complaining pretty loudly of "I WANT TO MOVE FROM HERE!!!!!" "I DON'T WANT TO L-I-V-E HERE ANYMORE!!!!!".....  They were ALL convinced that it was a scorpion!!  And they were starting to really freak me out!  So I took the pics and ran to the computer to ask Google what the hell it was!  And my family was RIGHT!  I found it immediately and it IS a WINDSCORPION.  After seeing WHAT this was, I seriously was almost hyperventilating!  So after I forced myself to read past the "scorpion" part of the name, I read that they burrow during the day and only come out at night (yep!) to look for prey such as spiders (YAY!), beatles and termites.  I learned that these windscorpions do NOT produce venom (YAY!) and that they only bite when you "handle" them.  Well, I can assure you, Mr. Windscorpion...WE WILL NEVER TRY TO HANDLE YOU!!

I learned that they live in "dry, desert" areas...THIS IS COLORADO for crying out loud!  But yes, they are found in Colorado and Texas, among other places.  Well remember how I said that Tita said she had never seen one of these in her LIFE?  I haven't either!  And I have lived in so many places!

Armando ended up killing and disposing of this latest "visitor" too.  And after I read to him AND the kids of this thing NOT being venomous, everyone was ok after that.  And since we all really don't like spiders at ALL, I guess these windscorpions can eat them up.  But not in my house!  I think if I were to find another one of these some day, I will have my strong and brave husband capture it and put it outside.

So have you ever seen one of these before?  If you were to see one of these in your house would you want to pack up and LEAVE like my family did??

Oh, and I just want to mention that my family and I treat our visitors very nicely...we only kill and dispose of visitors that belong to the insect/reptile/rodent families (:

Have a gReAt WeEkEnD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!