Aug
9
August 9, 2007
You guys cracked me up with your responses on the last post, but if you think I’m clicking ANY of your illustrative links, you’re out of your goddamned mind. Especially when the URL is accompanied by a comment like “This one made MY skin crawl and I LIKE spiders!”
Yeah. Right. Because I want to wake up screaming every night for a MONTH.
I had hoped our Giant House Spider visitation was an anomaly, but JB claims he’s seen at least four (!!!!) in the garage, and he killed one in the bathtub the other morning. I didn’t ask him how, because if he squished it against the tub and didn’t clean the remnants and later that night I unwittingly took a nice warm bubble-and-spider-goo bath, well . . . you know how they say knowledge is power? Sometimes that is just so not true.
Now I’m almost constantly paranoid, of course. I do a visual sweep before cautiously entering a room, and whenever I see something remotely arachnid-like (read: anything smaller than a loaf of bread) I announce my presence with a high, ululating scream of terror. I feel this helps inform any potential spider occupants that they should remove themselves to a less offensive location, such as on the surface of Mars where they belong.
In other news, we had a bad scare with Dog the other day. When JB and I came home on Tuesday, she was gone, having escaped from the backyard some hours before. The construction on the house was particularly loud that day, with sheet rock going in and saws blaring, so we guessed the noise just frightened her enough to squeeze under the temporary makeshift fence back there.
Her custom-made collar with our contact information stamped onto the tag? Just lying there on the patio table, because we’ve grown lazy about putting her collar on before leaving for the day.
JB drove around looking for her, while I trundled around the neighborhood with the stroller trying not to feel foolish about yelling “HERE GIRL! HERE!” into people’s yards. But no dice. Dog was gone.
Our annoying next door neighbor told us she’d seen Dog running loose, but was in “too much of a hurry” to stop and do anything. Thanks, lady. Remind me to crash your next party. With a Molotov cocktail.
Since the local animal rescue offices were closed, as a last ditch effort I printed up some lost dog flyers and posted them on nearby mailboxes and stop signs (is that illegal, posting stuff on stop signs? If so: oops). We spent the evening moping around the house, occasionally stepping outside and yelling Dog’s name. I felt so horrible, because it was entirely our fault, from the hoopty fence to the AWOL collar. I thought of all the times I’ve been impatient with her, booting her out of the way when she was underfoot, pushing her aside when she tries to horn in on some of the affection we give Riley, yelling at her when all she was doing was licking herself.
O, the guilt.
JB made the dire prediction that we had seen the very last of her, and I’m sure he would be really pissed at me if I confided to you that I saw his eyes watering, so let’s just say that sheet rock dust sure can trigger some allergies.
Thankfully, there is a happy ending: a neighbor several blocks away called us late Wednesday morning, having taken Dog in the night before (apparently she was just hanging out on these people’s front door step, waiting to be let in) and discovered one of our flyers the next day. She came home no worse for wear, only slightly muddy from befouling this kind family’s backyard pond.
The fence has been fortified, and Dog’s collar is now permanently in place. Boy, there’s nothing like being threatened with the loss of your pet to re-appreciate their presence. All those little Dog annoyances—the scritch scritch scritch of her toenails and she pads up and down the hallways, the slup . . . slup . . . slup of her self-cleaning tongue baths, the way she lies directly against the couch and breathes Death Lab Halitosis up at me while I’m watching Battlestar Galactica—all of those things now seem like glorious reminders that she’s here with us and not smashed up on the side of a highway.
Hell, I’ve even decided not to get bent out of shape when I vacuum the entire floor and five minutes later it looks like this:
Well. Okay, that DOES still suck, but I can deal. Long live Dog! (So say we all!)
Aug
7
August 7, 2007
Today the sheet rock is going up in the addition, and if there’s anything that can fuck up your whole house more than sheetrock dust, I don’t know what it is. Oh wait I do know, it’s insulation foam, which was splurted into various places over the weekend and has been occasionally breaking loose and gently drifting down from the exposed kitchen ceiling ever since.
JB’s parents were visiting last weekend, and JB’s mother kept telling me how well I was handling the remodel. “Well, you sure seem serene about all this,” she said, which instantly made me paranoid that she really meant, “Way to not even try and keep things clean, slacker.” Which I don’t think she did. Except . . . well, there was that odd moment when she fingered the coat of dust on a nearby houseplant and . . . ah, fuck it. I’m sure that’s not what she meant.
(?!)
Anyway, what else can a person do when their house is being gutted but succumb to the chaos? I hardly even notice the workers trampling around the kitchen in the morning while I’m hoovering down my increasingly large bowl of Cinnamon Life (hello, and welcome to my craving of the week) anymore. Hell, I make my coffee in the bathroom right now, what’s the use in getting worked up over a little insulation foam in my cereal?
Besides, there are far worse concerns at hand. It’s August, and maybe some of you know what that means. That’s right, it’s Giant House Spider Mating Season. And oh jesus god, I had my first encounter yesterday (after I had just recovered from reading Megan’s G.H.S. entry, too).
There it was, just lurking there on the carpet. I don’t know what made it catch my eye, maybe its sheer girth and audible footsteps. It was so big and horrifying I actually felt my brain trying to shear lose from the confines of my skull, possibly trying to escape to safety through my eyesockets.
I immediately scooped up Riley, not so much out of a fear that he would somehow be bitten but more from the deep and shameful knowledge that if he touched that godawful thing, I could never kiss him again.
I was frozen in indecision for a moment, standing there with a bemused toddler dangling from one arm, but it was apparent that in JB’s absence—he was off in the shop, too far away to hear a terrified squawk—I would have to deal with T. gigantea on my own.
When you’re a person with a bit of a spider phobia to begin with and you’re faced with an arachnid the approximate size of a fucking dinner plate, you don’t just get some paper toweling. You need long-range weaponry. I didn’t really want to squish it into the carpet, but my other options seemed equally unappealing: spray it with oven cleaner, get out a revolver and pump it full of bullets, set the entire house on fire, etc.
I ended up dragging Riley with me into the utility room where I grabbed a broom, deposited Riley on the floor and told him “STAY HERE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE”, and rushed back to the carpet where I summoned every ounce of courage and used the broom to whack frantically at the spider while simultaneously shrieking a cowardly, girly squeal of fright mighty war cry. I swear I felt that broom bounce harmlessly off the thing’s back a few times before he seemed to succumb, legs curling inward.
I used another broom to kind of sweep it onto the first broom (while being occasionally overcome with massive, full-body shudders) and I threw everything out the back door. The spider’s body rolled off the broom and lay there on the concrete. Motionless. Thank god. I went back inside and proceeded to experience the sort of heebie-jeebies that make you scream and recoil from the dark thing on the counter before realizing that ha ha ha, it’s a hairband. Ha ha ha . . . whatthefuckisthat?!?
Of course, about an hour later when JB came in and went to get the brooms, he noticed that the spider was in fact NOT DEAD. No. ALIVE. That thing took about fifty-three smacks with a broom and it was still LIVING. Still slowly, painfully crawling its way along the patio and towards the back door, surely on some dark mission of revenge, despite its many wounds, planning to limp all the way into our house and onto our bedroom ceiling, where in the dead of night, with its very last shred of strength, let itself drop down, down, down, down, into my open and snoring—
Well. Anyway, JB squished it flat. The end. I think.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, now that I’ve written all this down and relived it I have some very important activities to engage in, mainly involving batting wildly at random, invisible things nearby and lunging at various body parts in order to scratch at myself like a cracked-out baboon.
-
My product review site:
[