My best friend, or perhaps actually her mother, has an endearing idiosyncrasy in which, when there is a critter or a creature in the house that shouldn't be, instead of, say, stomping it, squishing it with a broom, running and hiding, or screaming and flailing about like any normal person would, she places a very heavy piece of pottery on top of the creature so that there is no risk of it coming to eat her in her sleep, and waits for a day, a week, or a month for the critter to die of its own accord. Then, cautiously, without so much as lifting up the bowl or pot or planter, she slides a piece of cardboard underneath the stoneware, takes the whole thing outside and tosses the once-was critter away.
I have two stories related to this: The first was several months ago. I was visiting this friend and as her mother was walking through the house, a spider scurried by. And it wasn't just some little friendly house spider that could be caught by the web and set carefully on the front porch: we're talking halfway to tarantula here. In appropriate feminine fashion, the three of us leapt onto the couch and away from the spider.
Now, If you have known me for any time at all, you probably know that I'm pretty bold when it comes to most household creatures, but that if you put me anywhere near a flying insect (or, perhaps, a flying insect anywhere near me), my severe, debilitating fear of wasps kicks in and I cease to function.
So, spiders don't fall in this category, and once this gargantuan arachnid was established to not be of the flying variety, my instinctive flight reaction cooled down and I offered to be the one to throw the bowl. While she was getting out the bowl to set on top of the spider, provided that we could find it (now that it had run under a folding door), my friend's mother mentioned how one time in the past she had squished a spider that was about the same size, but instead of dying like a good squished spider, it spewed hundreds of thousands -or maybe millions- of teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy baby spiders.
So, I'm bold, but the mental image of millions of minuscule eight-legged monsters still kind of freaked me out a little. With some doing, I managed to drop the bowl on top of this surely-not-a-momma spider, and we slid it across the floor of the entry hall to the door of the house. The intent was to flick the thing over the threshold into the outside where it (and, by extension, we) would live happier lives.
The first flick failed. The thing just wandered off the other direction, back into the house, like it lived there or something. We trapped it the second time pretty easily, and after acquiring a piece of sturdy cardboard, we went to flick it over the threshold.
Well, let's just say that the momma spider might be dead or might be living a better life on the other side of the door, but the millions - and it must have been millions because the floor began to crawl - of teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy baby spiders that scattered across the entry hall floor did not live to see better days. Our desire to avoid nightmares of spiders swarming and consuming us in our sleep outweighed the fear of the creepy-crawly, and we stomped everything we could see moving for several minutes.
It was, perhaps the most horrific moment of my life, and I'm not even that bothered by spiders. I wish I'd taken a picture.
The second story happened tonight. Jason is in the process of moving to another house, and, since we'll be married in December and he'll be living here, much of the things that will eventually come to my house are already in transit. One of these things is his large, flat-screen television that makes my TV, which I like very much, feel like a poor little baby TV. So, we were searching high and low for the screws to mount the larger television on the wall where the little one has been for a year, to no avail.
Convinced that I had put all of the hardware to the wall mount back in its box (where it should be, but wasn't), I was in the attic looking through empty boxes in the hopes of stumbling across a package of the exact right size screws. No luck. They weren't in the mount box; they weren't in the TV box. I was about to give up when I spied a package of what I believed to be screws behind the row of boxes.
That was my first mistake. The second mistake was touching the package, which began to rattle and buzz and move about on its own. I couldn't read what it said it was supposed to contain, but upon the realization that it contained a living creature and not mounting screws, I rushed away, desperately wanting a heavy bowl to drop on top of the whole bag of who-knows-what.
What I know now is that there's a live critter in my attic - no surprise there - and that I don't really want to touch it ever. The whole thing gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Ick.
