Ewwwwwwwwwww

I think I've mentioned a time or a thousand that I don't like daddy long leg spiders. I'm getting the shivers just looking at this picture! YUCK!

This past weekend, my youngest kidlet and I went with Manchild to our country place and had a little redneck fun. It's really nice now that the weather has cooled some. But there's something bad that happens when it cools off...the spiders try to move indoors. This means that I am on constant alert, making sure there's not a spider within 265 miles of me. Needless to say, I don't rest very easily because I'm always on the lookout.

I'm used to being in the shop and finding the little bastards er, the creatures crawling about. The first thing I usually do is hook up the air hose and blast the floor to kingdom come to make sure I've blown each and every spider out the door and on to greener pastures (3 counties away). And I always keep a long handled broom near me in case a rogue one makes it back inside, so I'm OK out there for the most part.

Being the "adult" female means I'm the one in charge of the meals. I love anything cooked on the grill, so I employ ours a lot.

That's not really our grill, I just thought it looked like something Manchild would froth at the mouth ove,r seeing as how it's a gun and all. Anyway...I was all set to begin our Friday evening grill fest. I had gathered lots of twigs (after making sure there were no spiders hitching a ride), and lots of firewood and was ready to set up the grill. That's when the first problem occurred. I was about to lift the lid of the grill when I noticed a gnarly, nasty, huge long leg spider sitting right by the handle...waiting to jump on my face or something horrible like that. I didn't have my trusty broom with me so I couldn't just sweep it off. I tried slamming the lid up and down so it'd succumb to brute force and fall off. It didn't work. I tried sweeping it off with a very long stick which didn't work. I finally rolled up a piece of newspaper and made myself get brave enough to get close to it and swat it away. The entire time I was doing this, I was squealing with horror and my hiney was cringing and my skin had broken out in Texas sized gross out goose bumps.

Spider hazard #1 was successfully averted! Hooray! The next step was to arrange all of the kindling and wood in the grill. That part went just fine - I was going to build a beautiful fire..................................................................................oops, sorry. I sort of went into la la land thinking about FIRE (sigh.....). The next step involved me getting down onto the ground so I could get my hand into the airspace below the wood, at the bottom of the grill. I opened the little air hole door and guess what was waiting for me there? ARRRRGHGHG, that's right! A dang stinkin' daddy long legs! I think at that point I lost consciousness for a second and maybe wet myself a little. All I know is when I got back to planet earth, I moved faster than a girl has ever moved away from a grill. Of course, I erupted into screams and yelps and lots of swatting at myself to make sure that spider hadn't jumped on me. My hair is only about 2" long but I pulled at it and brushed it with my hands and dislodged about 74,265 hairs trying to make sure there wasn't a spider hiding. I'm almost bald now.

If there was a spider right at the airspace door, there were probably THOUSANDS inside where I had to jam paper with my bare hands. I could practically hear their deadly teeth clacking and their gross legs banging around. And I had to stick my hand in there?!?!?!? EWWWWWWWWWWWW! Since I couldn't let Mr. Wonderful think that I was some kind of helpless Scarlett, I wadded up a ton of paper; enough that as long as I stuffed it in right at the door and kept stuffing it in there, I wouldn't have to put my hand inside. And it worked.

Did you happen to notice a large fireball in the sky Friday evening? I did it. I had stuffed enough paper in that grill in order to avoid those spiders, that I had a flame 500 feet tall. The paper combined with frying spiders (die ugly bugs, DIE!!!) was enough to light the whole county up. Well, not really but I did have lots of paper burning at first.  The fire was roaring in no time and the spiders that were stupid enough to hang on when I lit all of that paper on fire, had their grody, scary teeny legs burned right off and I didn't feel badly about it one bit.

My skin stopped tingling at about noon on Monday. I quit staring at the ground to make sure nothing would crawl up my leg. I felt a little safer. But I worry about the next cold snap that's heading my way. That will mean that more spiders will want to hide out where it's warm. I've got it! I'll move to the arctic and live in an igloo! Surely there aren't any spiders that live in ice! I'll send you a postcard.