Archives for March, 2008

Ants in my pants.

One of my house­mates used to leave cans of Coke in our freezer and for­get about them until they exploded, leav­ing Coke slush all over our frozen foods. This hap­pened often enough that a small moun­tain of slush accu­mu­lated at the bot­tom of our freezer, which attracted a bat­tal­ion of ants. We dealt with it by dous­ing every­thing with bug spray, which also gave me a good excuse to eat out every day of that week. Just like the Coke slushy moun­tain attracted the ants, the ants, I think, also attracted my arch-nemeses— spiders.

My mom is afraid of fly­ing, my brother is afraid of becom­ing a per­pet­ual grad stu­dent, my dad is afraid of the church guys who come to our house want­ing to con­vert us, and I am afraid of spi­ders. I was the only per­son in my class who was thrilled when Char­lotte from Charlotte’s Web died.

I’ve rearranged my life so the chance of bump­ing into a spi­der is as low as it can get. If I need to use the pub­lic restroom and it’s occu­pied by a spi­der, I’ll hold it. I’d rather get a uri­nary infec­tion than risk being bit­ten. I limit my out­door activ­i­ties because that’s their ter­ri­tory, not mine. My land­lord hasn’t installed our fire alarms yet, so there are big, gap­ing holes in our ceilng. My room­mate is con­cerned that we could pos­si­bly burn to death in our sleep, but I’m more con­cerned about the pos­si­bil­ity of spi­ders mak­ing their descent from there.

Dur­ing every encounter with a spi­der, I spray so much bug spray that it dies not from the poi­son, but from drown­ing. I asked my friends to Google nat­ural spi­der repel­lents because I was too afraid that Google would return the image results as the first item. Sup­pos­edly, spi­ders hate laven­der and lemon. I spent part of my week­end gath­er­ing lemon spray, laven­der sachets, laven­der oil, laven­der hand-soap, laven­der sham­poo— basi­cally any­thing that could be scented with laven­der, I now own. My head is hurt­ing from the fra­grance over­load, but I’ll get used to it.

Feel free to share your spi­der horror/success sto­ries. I want to hear them! But mostly the suc­cess ones.

I am no good with segues, so here are some pho­tos from Point Reyes last, last week­end. These were taken by my friend Jason:

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