Friday, June 02, 2006

Arachnophobia

There was an incident a few years back that did me in. It was before Grant and I got married, and we were at his parents house. It was night, and he was walking me out to my car. While we were making our way through the garage, I saw this weird looking creature crawling right where we were about to walk. I stopped, and asked Grant to take a look at it. He said, "It's just a spider," and then proceeded to step on it (by the way, he was wearing a flimsy pair of flip-flops). As he squised this "creature" out came thousands of baby spiders, everwhere! Apparently, it was a wolf spider, carrying it's sac on it's back. That's why it looked so weird to us. Since then, after numerous nightmares, I have been terribly afraid of spiders - small, big, poisonous, non-poisonous. It doesn't matter.

A couple weeks back when Patrick and Jasmine were staying with us, I saw a little spider on the carpet. I grabbed some tissue to kill it with, knelt down, and could not bring myself to doing it. I was too scared. Thankfully, Patrick was there, so he saved me. This particular spider had red legs.

Just now, I was on my way upstairs. Usually, Watley follows me, but this time, he was preoccupied with something at the foot of the stairs. I went back down to see what he was playing with, and it was this same type of red-legged spider.

Since I was by myself, I got up the courage to pick up the spider, and flush it down the toilet (Watley had already killed it). You see, when I'm by myself, I can do these things, because the thought of that spider not getting taken care of right then and there, scares me the most.

So, just now, I decided to google "red legged spider" to see what I could come up with. Bad idea. All of these really scary images popped up, and now I can't get them out of my head, and I'm itchy all over, and I keep thinking I feel something crawling on me.

By the way, none of the pictures showed looked anything like the spider in our house. So, there's just some mystery spider that keeps coming into our house. And that doesn't make me happy!!

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:35 PM

    That's funny because Patrick is a little sqeemish when it comes to bugs and rodents. When he taught middle school, he had a pacman frog and he could barely feed the blind thing. But I had better be nice because he just bought me this cool cell phone that is a mini laptop. We are up late playing with the new electronic toy. But back to bugs, we have to pay quarterly for an exterminator come about every 3 weeks. One night the yuckiest thing happened, I saw a little spider on my bed and it was comming for me. I can't believe I saw it in the dark. Patrick came to the rescue! Maybe you can teach Watly to swat spiders.

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  2. Anonymous6:22 PM

    Your post reminded me so much of myself! I, too, sometimes feel like things are crawling all over me when I see or hear about bugs, particularly spiders. I had a few "incidents" as a child that I believe may have had some impact on that. I never even killed or otherwise "dealt with" bugs in my home until Chris went away to Officer Training School for 12 weeks. Like you, the thought of leaving them alone was even more icky to me than having to deal with them on my own. We lived in an old house in a wooded area at the time, so it was a bit of a problem. One thing I really like about New Mexico is less bugs! :)

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  3. Anonymous8:04 AM

    Yes, the bugs are definitely few and far between out here...much better than the south!

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  4. Anonymous4:53 PM

    did i show you my spider week from last week? I can't remember - i actually thought my skin was being necrotized! i took a picture of it - so if anyone is interested in seeing my side with an enormous spider bite - i will email.

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  5. Anonymous6:18 AM

    Beware: We had these big red legged spiders in our house growing up. They were big and icky but they were also smart. If you swatted them with a shoe or something they would curl up and look dead. Then when you would leave to get TP to clean them up, they run away. They would also bite, one bit my aunt through toilet paper and made her finger bleed. My mom asked some biologist person at our church what kind they were...well this person took it to the university and no one in the lab could figure out what kind it was. Moral of the story, make sure they are dead. Why are we so scared of such little creatures? I dont know, but my skin is crawling now.

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  6. Anonymous6:59 AM

    Jen, that is so scary!! The good thing about our red-legged spiders is that they're not big at all. They're pretty tiny. Unless that means they're the babies!! Then that means there's a mama spider somewhere! Okay, now I'm really scared.

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