eptivity

I apologize for the spider-centric posts of late, but I just have this one tiny additional story to tell you. Okay, so remember the previous reference to the annual and prolific spider invasion? It’s now over, thank goodness, but when we got back from the US, I had ten or so spiders to usher outside, and for a few weeks there, two or three new ones every day. I can’t bring myself to kill them, and let’s just say that spider mitigation is 100 percent my responsibility.

ANYWAY, so there we were, minding our own television-watching business, when one of us whimpered and assumed the fetal position. At first I thought it was in response to some horrible thing on television, until I tracked what Stephan was pointing at: the largest spider I’ve ever seen in the wild, maxin’ and relaxin’ under our radiator. He was like practical joke big. His body was about the size of, let’s say, a cashew, and his leg span was easily three inches.

As mentioned, I usually deposit them gently outside, but there was NO WAY this guy was being set free to terrorize us again. Sorry dude, but you must have missed that day of Survival Of The Fittest training: if you grow too big, you become a threat that must be eliminated.

He was too big to smash, and he was too big to fit under the rim of a drinking glass like normal, so I had to catch him under a Gladware container and he was NOT happy. I dropped him in the toilet and he wiggled around for the few seconds it took for me to operate the lever, and then he was gone.

Gone, but not forgotten.

Three repercussions I in no way expected:

Guilt—Most of the spiders I deal with just sit complacently under their glass until I deposit them outside, whereupon they thank me for my graciousness and wave a cheerful goodbye. Whereas this fellow scrambled furiously about and tried to swim his way out of the toilet. I’m pretty sure I heard him call me a name that I can’t repeat here because my mom reads this.

Insomnia—Although this was a good two hours before sleepy time, the adrenaline and the remembered creepiness kept me up for a while.

Irrational Terror—I could not bring myself to use that toilet for the next three days (note to nosey parkers: don’t worry; we have two others).

Stephan and I later discussed how the whole experience was much creepier than, say, finding a tarantula, because as big as the tarantula is, it’s basically a small rodent whose presence is more easily monitored.

We plan on leaving this hypothesis untested.