Saturday, April 08, 2006

Spiders

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I just got through telling how wonderful spring is. Well, one spring thing I don't like is Wolf Spiders!! They come suddenly one day out of nowhere. I know they aren't poisonous, but they are so ugly. And the fat ones make a mess on the carpet!! Throughout spring and summer I must have a paper towel in hand every time we open the door to go outside. It's like they are just patiently waiting to scurry in! Eew!
There are worse things, though, then Wolf Spiders.
In fact, a few years ago we had a Black Widow infestation in our back yard.


Mark would laugh at me everytime I went into the back yard because I would have to do my "Black Widow check". I would slowly and carefully walk along our fence to see if there were any new webs. I got pretty good at identifying the widows' webs. One good thing about these creepy crawlers is that they usually stay on their webs, but my biggest fear was that the boys, when playing outside, would accidentally happen upon a web and become a victim. Mullin knew not to go near the fence, and he wouldn't dare. Lincoln, on the other hand, was a bit too young to understand the danger. All of my checking eventually paid off because one day, as I was poking
around in their outside toys, I spotted the deadly spider on the strap of one of their backpacks. You
can imagine my horror! I don't remember seeing any
last year, but it is about time for me to start checking again!


I haven't had much luck with spiders, so I guess that is why I dislike them so much-- Well, except for those really pretty garden spiders that spin beautiful webs. Those are neat. Shortly
after Mark and I got married, I discovered the apartment we lived in was infested with the infamous brown recluse. I worked as a nanny at the time and the kids' dad owned an exterminating company. He confirmed my worst fear!! Our landlord seemed extremely put out by the fact she had to have the pest control guys out at least once a month to spray our apartment. This was a huge test for our marriage! Mark acted like the problem wasn't that big of a deal, and I was a basket case. One night as I was taking Lasagne out of the oven, I noticed something on my shirt. It was a huge Brown Recluse! I screamed like I was being kidnapped, flicked it off with the spatula I was holding, and ripped off my clothes to see if I had been bitten. Mark came tearing out of the bedroom and through hysterical sobs I explained what had happened. Crying, I called my mom while Mark looked for the spider. I wasn't going to bed until it had been found and murdered! He finally found it behind the refrigerator. I am sure some of you are thinking I am just a crazy nut, but I was sincerely afraid. In the mornings, the first thing I would see would be a fresh brown recluse still alive on the glue board we had by our bed. We had glue boards all over our one bedroom apartment. When it was all said and done, I counted over 70 trapped recluses. It was a good day when we left that nasty place. After packing all of our belongings into black garbage bags with gloves on, I lined up all of those glue boards and left them on the kitchen counter. I hope our landlord was the one that had to throw them away. I should have called Andy Wise.












This brings back terrible memories!!

3 comments:

T-Bone said...

thats just nasty

Anonymous said...

I forgot everything about that whole incident except the "ripped off my clothes" part.

Planting those brown recluses in our apartment was a genius idea!!

Anonymous said...

I remeber those phone calls like they were yesterday, glad that's over!

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