Question of the Day

An email from Shaker Juliemania, published with her permission:

Its almost 3 am, I am getting sleepy sitting on my comfy couch (been there for hours) reading. I'm trying to get the end of a chapter so I can go to bed, when out of the corner of my eye I catch movement on the floor by the coffee table.

I try to focus realizing I can't see shit with my reading glasses on, I look again sans glasses and see a ginormous spider scuttling-running across the floor. Squealing and jumping up barefooted to see where its going, and when I get about 3 feet…it sees me and Stops! Shit!—now what?

It's huge (2+ inches in diameter) and its just sitting there waiting. No frigging way I am stepping on it. I remember the last time I tried to kill a spider that big—it jumped at me. (It was a very traumatic experience.)

Adrenaline pumping, I.Don't.Like.Spiders. I grab my now empty wine glass, thinking I will trap it and get it out the house. I look at the tarantula spider and then at the opening of the wine glass, no friggin way, not big enough, not getting that close.

For an eternity me and spidey stand there looking at each other. I'm afraid to run past him to the kitchen and I'm frantically looking around the living room for something, anything to get this fucking spider out of my house.

I spot the small tupperware of mixed nuts, fuck it, I dump the contents out on the table, and throw the container over the spider. Nothing, it just sits there waiting. Shit. What's it planning?

What to do? Maybe I should wake up my wife, she'll get it out. NO! I'm butch for christsake, I.Can.Do.This!

I grab a sheet of paper from a pile on the table, no wait, grabs two more, and slowly slide them under the tupperware container. Reaching out, Stop! the paper is not thick enough to pick up, it could bite me, escape or something. Yikes. Find a small notepad, not wide enough, but hopefully, hopefully it will add integrity to the paper.

Heart pounding, I inch my hand under the notepad and paper, the spider still hasn't move, until…I…lift and then it goes fucking crazy, running around the corners of the square container looking for any breach at the paper edge. Shit!

Walking Running to the front door praying that the edges are flat enough, noticing the cats have finally come to see what's going on, where the fuck were they hours minutes ago? I get the door open, I want to just hurl everything out the door, but I know, just know, it will jump on me as soon as its airborne. So I run down the steps, grab container in left hand, paper and pad in right and push them apart as hard and as far forward as possible. And it fucking disappears.

Eeek! making sure its not on me, I race into the house practically hyperventilating, the cats are freaking out trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. I.Can.Not. shake the willies.

Wide Awake now, I pour myself another glass of wine, I am so glad I didn't use it to trap the spider, yuck. I finally got to bed around 4:30am.

I.Do.Not.Like.Spiders!

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So…what don't you like? Spiders don't bother me at all, and most insects don't phase me in the slightest—although I'm not crazy about these really big, hairy moths we get in the house sometimes, because they have, on multiple occasions, gotten tangled in my hair when I'm trying to catch them and get them back outside. So I tend to leave those to Iain, and I take the spiders, which I'm happy to let crawl all over me, while he squirms and shouts about how he's certain they're from another planet because "noothing else oon earth looks like thoose bloody fings!"