de retour
Nothing says Monday morning like a spider in the bathtub.
And not one of the tiny plant-dwellers, either, the hardly-a-spider-at-all!s. No. A big, black, prickly bastard who arrived, fully equipped with eight spiny legs, from God knows where to lurk in my bathtub on a morning I'd specifically eyeballed to start with a good attitude.
Well, fuck my good attitude. There's a spider in my bathtub.
My nice, clean bathtub that I scrubbed out with Vim on Friday night, in spite of hating that particular task more than any other household chore, and in spite of the fact that I was supposed to be getting dressed up to go to some cops-and-firemen social. But it was pouring rain and I was tired and the bathtub was really dirty and the last cop I met socially had the most ridiculous email address I've ever encountered (involving both The Wizard of Oz and his birth year, and hosted on hotmail, of all things), so I decided to stay home and give myself a migraine with the one household cleaner guaranteed to do just that, every time.
So my bathtub was clean. And then it had to get a spider in it.
Did you know that Tilex doesn't kill spiders? Well, it doesn't. What it DOES do is make them spread out all their legs, spread-eagle-style (assuming an eagle had an extra set of wings and legs, I guess), and then run furiously around the bathtub. If you then run the shower on top of them, it makes them do all of these things in the far reaches of the bathtub. And if you try to use the shower curtain to push them toward the drain, then you are a fool with a Tilex-soaked spider on your shower curtain.
Eventually, of course, the litre of Tilex I'd poured into the tub slowed him a down a bit. Because if it corrodes human flesh, spider skin can only hold out so long, right? And then he curled into a little ball, and that's when I redoubled efforts to float him toward the drain. He slipped past the hole with the tiniest of final struggles, and then I ran the faucet, full strength, for a solid ten minutes to push him down as far as possible.
That, so far, has been my Monday. At least I know his has been worse.
And not one of the tiny plant-dwellers, either, the hardly-a-spider-at-all!s. No. A big, black, prickly bastard who arrived, fully equipped with eight spiny legs, from God knows where to lurk in my bathtub on a morning I'd specifically eyeballed to start with a good attitude.
Well, fuck my good attitude. There's a spider in my bathtub.
My nice, clean bathtub that I scrubbed out with Vim on Friday night, in spite of hating that particular task more than any other household chore, and in spite of the fact that I was supposed to be getting dressed up to go to some cops-and-firemen social. But it was pouring rain and I was tired and the bathtub was really dirty and the last cop I met socially had the most ridiculous email address I've ever encountered (involving both The Wizard of Oz and his birth year, and hosted on hotmail, of all things), so I decided to stay home and give myself a migraine with the one household cleaner guaranteed to do just that, every time.
So my bathtub was clean. And then it had to get a spider in it.
Did you know that Tilex doesn't kill spiders? Well, it doesn't. What it DOES do is make them spread out all their legs, spread-eagle-style (assuming an eagle had an extra set of wings and legs, I guess), and then run furiously around the bathtub. If you then run the shower on top of them, it makes them do all of these things in the far reaches of the bathtub. And if you try to use the shower curtain to push them toward the drain, then you are a fool with a Tilex-soaked spider on your shower curtain.
Eventually, of course, the litre of Tilex I'd poured into the tub slowed him a down a bit. Because if it corrodes human flesh, spider skin can only hold out so long, right? And then he curled into a little ball, and that's when I redoubled efforts to float him toward the drain. He slipped past the hole with the tiniest of final struggles, and then I ran the faucet, full strength, for a solid ten minutes to push him down as far as possible.
That, so far, has been my Monday. At least I know his has been worse.