Arach-annoyed
So last night I was checking my email before bed, sitting alone in the kitchen, and I see something out of the corner of my eye. I turn and sure enough, there's a medium-sized spider crawling across the floor. Yipes! Not really large enough to be truly scary, but large enough that it ought to die, but here's me in bare feet. I thought of Ben and called out (not too loudly, as I didn't want to wake Gwen) "I require assistance!" Chris came downstairs to find me shifting from foot to foot as I reported that the spider had now crawled under the plastic file drawers.
He suggested that I go to the other room while he dealt with it, as I was now feeling a little heebie-jeebie, so I moved to the living room, where I discovered that our dinner dishes and so on were still waiting to be cleaned up. "Well, I can do that while I'm waiting," I thought, and picked up a dishtowel from the table. I walked back into the kitchen to hang it on the stove, and as I walked towards the stove my eyes were struggling to resolve what I was seeing. As soon as it became clear to me, I froze in place and became capable only of saying "Oh, my. Oh, MY!" over and over again, while I flapped my arms and turned my head quickly from side to side. No, I was not having a seizure. I had spotted an infestation of tiny spiders, probably about 30, crawling all over the surface of my stove.
After I said "Oh, MY," about fourteen times, Chris came to see what was going on. Still speechless, I pointed to the stove. "Oh, CRAP," he said. "So, tiny spiders scare you too?" "Well, they do if there are A HUNDRED OF THEM," I told him. "I think that's pretty rational."
So off Chris went to find the Raid, meanwhile telling me that a spider must have crawled behind the stove and laid eggs which had now hatched (oh, joy). As he rummaged in the closet, he told me he still hadn't killed the other spider, either.
Chris THEN pointed out that Raid was flammable, and that we couldn't actually spray it anywhere near the stove in case we all blew up when we turned it on. "Well," I said, still twitching nervously, "We don't cook all that much anyway. And, I mean, maybe we could just have takeout for a couple of nights. That's kind of a cheaper option than ME MOVING OUT." Chris got the point, and sprayed accordingly, putting a note on the stove reminding us of the threat: "Do Not Use! BOOM!" with a charming picture of a mushroom cloud.
While he sprayed, the Original Spider came crawling back across the floor. I quickly grabbed the dishtowel and Killed it Dead.
As we lay in bed last night, I noticed that the light chain hanging from our ceiling fan looked a little odd. I wondered if the air currents from the fan were affecting it somehow. It wasn't until this morning when I turned on the light that I realized an enterprising spider had built a lovely triangular web between two of the lights and the bottom link of the chain. Is nothing sacred?
I'm feeling a wee bit outnumbered, to say the least.