I Am a Wuss

What can I say. I'm afraid of spiders. Daemon notwithstanding. I wish I could blame this fear on a Ron Weasley-type incident in childhood, but alas, I am Muggle through and through and no one in my family ever added hairy legs to any teddy bears. I try to leave them alone when they're outside, but once they're in my house, I am not much into live and let live.

So this evening I'm trying to catch up on laundry (caution: rabbit trail: I read a number of blogs and many of them comment on never being quite caught up on laundry). I had brought in the kitchen rug that had been on the porch waiting to be washed after the dog pooped on it (another long story). I neglected to inspect or shake out said rug before carrying it inside, and it had acquired at least one squatter during its sojourn on the porch. Said squatter either saw the washing machine or just took the opportunity after recovering from the shock of sudden relocation and left the rug by leaping onto my person and crawling down my leg. I felt rather than saw this, but when I looked down and discovered the GIANT spider running away from me I had what I considered the logical and sane response.

I screamed "like a girl" as the saying goes, and ran into the other room, frantically batting all over my body and jumping up and down in case he had friends with him. Then I realized I had just left this humongous being loose in the hallway where he would run God knows where and I would have to leave my home until he was found and destroyed. So I looked and he was still there by the wall at the top of the stairs, apparently debating his next move.

I contemplated stepping on him in my flip-flop clad feet, but immediately dismissed the idea as foolhardy, both because of being in semi-naked feet and because I didn't think my shoes were big enough. So I got one of the Mountain Man's work boots, brought it crashing down, and left it there. (The Mountain Man and the kids were outside during this incident. I would like to think that I would have shown more self-control and decorum if the kids were inside so as not to frighten them . . . but I'm pretty sure I would have had the same reaction no matter how many people were watching.)

I then attempted to stuff the rug the rest of the way into the washing machine as quickly as possible without actually touching it, in case he had relatives who had witnessed the assassination, and drowned them. Then I left the vicinity, still with the crawls (who am I kidding? I still have the crawls) and had to play five full hands of spider solitaire before I could sufficiently calm down to do anything productive. (And the irony of that is not lost on me.)

When the Mountain Man came in he asked me who was on the phone - he had seen me running from the laundry room but hadn't heard the yelling. He thought it was funny that I had used his shoes because I thought mine weren't big enough. But he cleaned up the carnage for me and didn't laugh too much.

Obviously, I cannot have a spider as a daemon. I must go back to the Golden Compass website and try it again.