My fear and my reality

Since our recent kitchen clean-out aka painting and hanging shelves (two weeks ago), I was really careful about cleaning the trim around the window, around the doors, and the baseboards. That's how I know the content of these two following images is brand spankin' new.

Meet our roommate. And no, I'm not happy about it. At all.

You can sort of see the creepy strands of web this guy laid out. He has been pretty successful in catching his own wild game. It's too bad I find him one of the most repulsive, disgusting, creepy, crawly, scary creatures on the face of this planet. Actually, it's not too bad at all. He deserves it.

Give me rats. Give me cockroaches. Give me snakes, please! Give me whatever you're afraid of and I'll gladly give you spiders. Or any arachnid. They're just so... creepy! I'm afraid of them and I don't care if you think it's stupid, or if you argue, "Trisha, they catch and eat mosquitoes and gnats and flies and beetles and other pesky insects!" You know what? So do bats. Give me bats! Please, give me bats. I LOVE bats! Bats are really cool because their wings ARE their hands. They fly by sonar in the night and they're still mammals. Mammals without eight disgusting jointed legs.

In case you didn't find the first picture gross enough, here's a picture my camera took all on its own, without any editing at all (except for my text) to support me in my efforts to have spiders outlawed and sent to Mexico to live with scorpions and centipedes and millipedes and other -pedes. Oh, and those terrible sand spider things they have over there in Afghanistan that they put into a ring to fight other giant insects. Actually, let's just send them all to Afghanistan. Load 'em up now! (I'm sending out a petition as soon as this is blog post goes live.)

Of course, any person who suffers from this right-of-mindedness others choose to call "arachnophobia" will tell you that it's not the size of the spider that makes the skin crawl and the mind panic. But I'm also here to tell you that a big spider is especially terrifying! The spiders that choose to make his kitchen windowsill their catching grounds are some of the most terrible spiders I've ever seen in my whole 26 years of being alive. They're black, but they're brown. They're about an inch in diameter. Their legs are long and lanky and spindly and creeeeeepy (I just shuddered) and they like to touch the surface they're walking on a few times before they actually take a step. Like they're smart or something. I know this because Carlton made me watch one once so we'd know where it was by the time he got a shoe to squish it. I had to watch it touch, touch, touch, creepy-step. Touch, touch, touch, creepy-step. Carlton took way too long to find a shoe. I think he did it on purpose. Because when I'm terrified, I tense up and my breath stops and I freeze and can't make any noise. I'm not a screamer... I'm more like a fainting goat, only without the convenience of the fainting part. Uh, that just made me sick to my stomach.

Okay, guys, if there is one thing that makes me think bad thoughts about South Georgia, it's these spiders. They're big and gross and they're in all my windowsills, littering them with insect carcasses and messing them up with gross sticky webs. And I can't see them. Because my window frames are black. And they tuck themselves in like it's comfortable in there or something. It just creeps me out. I can't wash dishes in my own kitchen sink without being afraid one's gonna go creeping across the windowsill. Because that happened once.

So, if you're out there reading this, keep me in your prayers. Please! Carlton sprayed the entire window frame with a strong bug killer. Here's hoping this creep goes outside to die a miserable, guilty death. And that I never find his curled up body anywhere. Amen.