This guy didn’t fare as well as the others. First of all I think the cat had been at him previously, since he only had 4 legs left before I started grabbing at him with tweezers to get him out from behind the mantel. And I didn’t realize that spider killer would um, dissolve him like that.
It’s interesting. Normally we get a ton of mail and catalogs every day. After my note to the mailman the other day, we only got one envelope. I’ll bet the rest went into the trash.
Oh and I found another brown recluse in the house yesterday.
I was sitting in the living room when Jo said, “Look Mommy, another spider.”
Crap.
I turn around and the mighty hunter cats have what appears to be a huge brown recluse cornered by the kitchen. Max kept playing with it and I trusted him to keep it busy while I went on a mad dash for an Agent of Spider Death. We didn’t have any bug spray, so I spritzed it good with some stainless steel cleaner. If I’d smashed it, identification would have been hard to do, so it was a last resort.
I put it in a jar and got a flashlight to look closely at it. It was all drawn up for a while so I couldn’t see the eyes. Eventually it relaxed (died?) and I could see. Instead of a real fiddle and the eye pattern of the brown recluse which is three pairs of two eyes in a crescent shaped pattern, this guy just had one cluster of eyes right in the middle. That makes it a Southern House Spider, non-poisonous and fairly common.
Still doesn’t change the fact there was an honest-to-goshen brown recluse in the bathtub with my girls the other night. But thinking that I had mutant huge recluses who just waltz around my living room had me pretty fricking depressed.
From today’s Sun newspaper:
Pet spider kills its owner
A MAN who lived in his own “zoo” of lizards and insects was fatally bitten by a pet black widow spider — then eaten by the other creepy-crawlies.
Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.
Neighbours alerted police after becoming alarmed by the stink.
And horrified officers were met by a nightmare scene.
A police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa.
“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth.
“There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles.
“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”
Loner Voegel, 30, never invited people back to his “jungle” home, a small apartment in the German city of Dortmund.
Police described it as a cross between a botanical garden and the butterfly breeding ground in the serial killer movie The Silence Of The Lambs.
One tarantula had built a nest the size of a swallow’s in a corner of the ceiling.
Voegel also had a boa constrictor and several poisonous frogs from South America.
Spider expert and animal cruelty officer Gabi Bayer said he kept creatures “that should never be allowed in a private home”.
She said: “He had spiders so aggressive they are the equivalent of a pit-bull in the animal world.”
The reptiles were allowed to roam free in the flat.
The heating elements on two tanks containing spiders and their termite snacks had exploded and dislodged the metal tops allowing them to escape.
Voegel is thought to have been dead for between seven and 14 days.
A post-mortem will be carried out in the next few days. But authorities believe Bettina alone was responsible for Voegel’s death.
I can’t believe this cat refused to eat. She follows me around all day long now, waiting for me to drop food. Someone enters the kitchen and she’s in there too, yowling for sustenance. She used to sit upstairs all day and was completely anti-social. Now I can’t peel her off my lap. That’s twice now that I’ve had cats who encountered near-death experiences who turned into complete and total love sluts after recovering. Apparently the thyroid medication really did a number on her. She’s off it and feeling swell.
Max got out the other night. Around 3 am we were just about to go to sleep and I called the cat. He didn’t come. Couldn’t find him anywhere. I went onto the porch and noticed the screen door was open.
Thus followed 2 hours of intense searching. I went on foot, hub went in the car. We woke up the neighbors across the street. Didn’t break my heart much; they’re the ones who had the dog yap for 5 hours straight one night and ignored the phone and doorbell. They let their dogs out at night and one of them is a biter. He charged me one night when I was about 8 months pregnant and out to check the mail. We ended up calling the police because when hub went to see what was going on, he got charged too. Every time we stepped out the front door we had a large angry barking dog run at us.
So I grabbed a flashlight and started walking around calling the cat. I’m pretty sure one of the neighbors thought I was up to no good, because about 15 minutes after I was back from the dead end down the street, a cop went tearassing down there and was there for about 10 minutes.
Around 5 am I started to think maybe I should get a couple hours of sleep and try again when it got light. I had tried getting Cuervo out to track the cat. Brave and valiant dog tracked the cat a good 15 feet, from the porch to the front steps. Woo. I tried one last time going to the porch and calling, and heard the cat jump onto the steps and brrrrrrrrrt at me. Joyous reunion. I picked him up and he was about 3 pounds heavier than usual. I think he ate all the nice next-door kitty’s food while he was out.
Hub was very nearly in a great deal of trouble for leaving the porch door open, after having accidentally let both Gus (gone for over a week) and Lilly (gone for 48 hours) out in the past. Max saved his bacon by returning.
Amazingly enough, Maddie is looking 100% better. She’s gaining weight and eating on her own again. The vet thinks it might have been a bad reaction to the thyroid medication. I tell you what, that cat was just about to die in my lap last Wednesday. Today she’s eating, purring, talking, bonking me with her head. Outstanding!
You may remember when I talked about my cat Zeke, whom I inherited from my grandmother a few years ago and died from acute kidney failure.
Or when I talked about losing Gus late last January, after a long bout of illness.
Or even back in July when I mentioned losing Lilly, and I mentioned that I was concerned that Maddie wouldn’t get over losing all her friends so close together.
Saturday morning I woke up to see that Maddie was crouched in the meatloaf position. She’s gotten terribly skinny lately, down to 4 pounds from her fighting weight of 8. I’ve been giving her medication for hyperthyroidism for the past few months, but it hasn’t seemed to stop the weight loss.
Blood tests showed kidney failure. Cat number four in the same number of years. She stayed at the vet on an IV until yesterday. She did not eat. They syringe-fed her, and she vomited it back up. She urinated on herself. The vet does not have much hope for her. X-rays show a large amount of kidney stones on both sides, which probably killed the kidneys. She came home yesterday to see if I could get her to eat in a more comfortable environment. I haven’t had much luck. A little chicken broth, some more syringe-fed food. So far she has kept it down, but I’m concerned about prolonging a life that is painful. Max is very upset and can’t understand why his friend won’t play with him anymore. I told the children that Maddie may go to heaven to be with Gus and Lilly and they started crying. “I don’t want Maddie to go. I like Maddie!”
I like her, too.
I know how much y’all love it when I post critter pictures. Hub found this in his sink upstairs. Click it for a bigger version.
That’s a brown recluse, albeit a small one. It’s really not a very happy spider; I think it’s about to die. Either it came home in hub’s kit from where we were camping, or it was maybe in the sink overflow. Hub’s pondering putting it down the barrel of a gun, then shooting. I just smile and say, “Yes, dear”.
