July 30, 2011

Arachnophobia

This morning I was awoken by the pitter-patter of tiny feet - except this time, the feet belonged to my cat instead of my children, and those feet weren't running down the hallway, they were trying to knead my face like a 5-day-old lump of dough. The only time I am woken in this manner is when my cats are out of food, so I knew if I didn't get up and feed them soon they would swarm me on the stairs or cough up a hairball on my work clothes.

So I shuffled to the basement, dished them up a hefty serving of the best dry food crap money can buy, and headed over to the sink with their water dish. As I grasped the handle of the faucet, my finger got caught in a cobweb - no big deal, it's a basement, it's to be expected, right? What I didn't expect, though, was to see a spider the size of Mongolia racing towards my hand at top speed. Suddenly, every fear I have had since my first viewing of "Arachnophobia" was playing out in real life. Thankfully, I maintained my bladder control and yanked my hand back quicker than you can say "GETITOFFME". As I did, it spun around and raced back to the firey pit from whence it came, obviously not in the mood to take on this giant wuss and her big bowl full of water.

*Shudders*

That experience alone is enough for me to have nightmares for a week... But this evening, as I was heading back down to the basement to switch out a load of laundry, I saw a dark black object scampering across the floor. Could it be? Is it the same man-eating spider I encountered earlier? I watched carefully as it crossed the floor, afraid to move in fear that it would make a flying leap towards me. But as it began to come more into view, pure horror washed over me. This was definitely not the spider I saw earlier, oh no - this was Bubba, his giant older cousin. He was no Mongolia, he was the entire continent of Asia. This is the kind of spider that eats those other spiders as a mid-morning snack. Obviously, given the fact that I haven't seen one of these in my basement in nearly a year, I should take these two sightings as proof that they are forming some sort of arachnoid militia and plan to invade the second I close my eyes tonight.

Sleep is overrated, right?

1 comment:

  1. Thank goodness someone else shares the same immense fear of spiders that I do. I put Olivia to bed the other night, closed her door and saw one crawling on her wall. I screamed and ran into the living room. She walked over to it, said "hi spider" and asked daddy to kill it. I was breaking out in a sweat and having a mini-heartattack.

    ReplyDelete

Got somethin' to say?