spiders
2004-06-09, 11:22 a.m.

This morning, I went to take my shower and discovered a big ass spider in the bathtub.

I am deathly afraid of spiders. I was frozen for a few moments and then took a step backwards and accidentally knocked a bottle off the counter.

My response to this was to shriek. I guess I thought the big ass spider was a decoy and the even bigger spider was creeping up in a sneak attack. But there was no bigger spider.

I had to kill the spider. The first step is to immobolize the spider. You don't want to go to kill the spider and have it run away or even worse, run toward you, so immobilization is the key. Raid makes an excellent spider killer. However, I have found that anything that comes in a spray will immobolize spiders.

Luckily, a bottle of tropical rain forest scented bug repellent was sitting on the counter. Half the bottle later, the spider was basically immobile (with the exception of a few twitches).

The next step is to get a heavy, blunt object and hit the spider four or five times and then squash and twist. You really have to be sure it's dead.

But then comes the disposal. When I kill spiders on the floor, I generally vaccum them right up. You really don't have to get close to the spider carcass when you vaccum. A good stretch and the spider carcass has been sucked into the dusty, hairy oblivion of the vaccum.

I have killed big ass spiders on the floor. However, they are a bit too big to be vaccummed and that requires another person to come in and remove the carcass.

When I kill spiders in other locations, I generally get approximately half a roll of paper towels and use that to pick up the carcass so the spider is never anywhere near my flesh.

Unfortunately, the big ass spider was too big for the paper towel trick and I had to wash it down the drain. However, I was then terrified that the spider wasn't really dead or that it's spider buddies were waiting at the end or in the drain and saw the dead carcass float on by and were planning an attack.

And that's why I took the fastest shower of my life this morning.