Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

We found 5 little baby brown recluses (reclii?) in the bathroom last night. Wonder how many are in a clutch of eggs. Wonder how many are living in my towels. Heavy sigh.

He was in the kids’ bathroom, on the floor about 3 inches from my bare toe.

In better news, the spider living in the windowframe which I thought was a recluse was really just a lookalike.

See? The eye pattern is all wrong.

It’s pretty impressive when you get them all together.

The brown ones are all recluses, all found in my house. The two black widows were found at a ranch in South Texas.

Never thought I’d see the day I was blase about stumbling over a brown recluse. It helps that the mighty feline hunters take care of most of them so I don’t have to deal with the living.

Hub: What’s that you got?
Me: Oh, just another brown recluse. It was on the bathroom floor.
Hub: Call the exterminator again.

Click for bigger version

Tonight I went to the mall and when I came home, hub told me to check out the five-legged creature in the jar on the counter. Another brown recluse, looked like, and the cats had had their way with it. That’s not the distressing part, really – we have had several recluses in the house and I’ve blogged about them before. Just search the blog for ‘recluse’.

The distressing part is that we thought it was dead and were trying to get a good picture of it to verify the eye pattern (recluses have three sets of two eyes, and copycats don’t), so hub put it on a paper plate and set up a tripod to take the picture, then we took the kids to put them in bed. While I was upstairs sitting with them, hub offered to go get me the new Harry Potter book (yes, I am a geek) and so he was gone by the time I came down. I went to look. No spider on the plate. No spider in the jar. No spider anywhere I can see. Where is the spider? Did it get flushed? Torched? Play dead and skitter off?

I don’t know.

That’s distressing.

Last night I came downstairs for a bit so as not to disturb Hub while he slept. Apparently I accidentally locked the cat into the living room/kitchen area when I went back up. He was in there for a good 4 hours or more. Well, he had to go potty. He didn’t want to go on the floor or the furniture, and cats naturally want to go someplace where they can cover up afterwards… the only alternative was in the bread nook. I just found it. I looked over at Max, who was looking over at me with the most miserable cringing expression on his face.

*sigh*

It’s my fault for locking him in there, but yuck.

I posted this on a message board a while back and meant to post it here too, but I forgot.

Okay, a lot of y’all have problems with spiders and cruelly, evilly, and with malice I post pictures of spiders in the threads discussing your phobias. Like kids drawn to a train wreck you click my links and I sit in my little chair and quietly giggle.

What you don’t know is the dark secret that’s been haunting me for years.

I have a desperate and mortal fear of roaches.

I don’t mind the little German ones. What I’m talking about are those big palmetto bugs, the nasty huge red ones that fly. When I encounter one, no matter how loudly the rational part of my brain screams into my ear, “It’s just a little bug and you are a big person and it’s not out to get you!”, the reptilian portion of my psyche is yammering away ten times louder in my other ear: “SCREAM AND RUN AWAY LIKE A LITTLE GIRL BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO FLY AT YOUR FACE, AT YOUR FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!”

At which point, even if I’ve managed to keep myself under control for 10 seconds and the roach has long since skittered away from the light, I burp out a little shriek and then spend the next 30 minutes shaking my head sadly at my totally involuntary reaction. I simply cannot help the screaming. I could be walking through a room filled with TNT and know that any loud noise would lead to my demise and I would scream anyway. It’s like closing your eyes when you sneeze. Screaming at the sight of a roach. Same thing. Reflex.

When I was a bachelorette I used to call my neighbors over to take care of roaches in my house. The guy in the garage apartment behind me was very kind. I’d tap at his door around midnight, ashy-faced and babbling incoherently. “Roach again?” he’d ask. I’d nod wildly. He’d drop what he was doing and come take care of it. He was a really nice guy except for his propensity to brandish a shotgun at the planes flying overhead.

Another issue is that I must never ever hear the actual squishing noise. When Hub goes to stomp on a roach, I run into the other room with my fingers in my ears and yell, “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” until he says it is safe.

So there you go. My Achilles heel. I hate roaches. And I live in Texas surrounded by massive oak trees, which are the preferred habitat of discriminating palmetto bugs everywhere. And I scream a lot.

The other day I was walking out to the garage and stepped over the bungie cord that my husband left on the stairs, silently cursing him because I could have tripped on it and broken my head. Then the bungie cord slithered into the flowerbed.

Yesterday my husband was cleaning out the garage and (after having found a suspiciously brown recluse-y looking spider) bent over to pick up the bungie cord on the floor and the bungie cord raised its head and flicked its tongue at him.

I hope our bungie cord stays around. He looks like he’s just the right size to take care of the waterbugs.