Everyone I Ever Was and Everyone I Ever Will Be

We just found a brown recluse upstairs.

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Those things are so addictive. Or maybe I'm just weird. :-)

So now you get to be subjected to my random babbling! Aren't you lucky.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to finish up my first draft of Redemption, so that is awesome. We went and bought some lumber today to finish up the garage (yay tax return!) And then I worked on the checkbook and realized that I switched two numbers and we actually have 15 dollars until payday, not 115. (boo math skills!)

You can tell it's spring, because the ants are trying to move back into our kitchen.

I am taking my attempt to focus on more positive things seriously. I got rid of some of my horror books that, while good, put me in a depressed mood or freaked me out in a "the entire human race sucks" way. And I'm actually starting to buy 'chick lit'. I think Ashley believed I was lost the last time we were in a bookstore together. ;-) Not that I don't still love my werewolves and zombies, but I'm going more for sarcasm/slightly dark/funny than soul-crushingly depressing.

Which of course means I have an idea for a really dark horror novella. But I figured out how to work on it-- I'm going to write scenes while on car trips, and that way there's always something distracting at the end of it, and I don't spend too much time at once immersed in that headspace. Win-win.

I think sometime soon I'm going to organize my tags better. Have a tag for each one of my novels, go through and have a bunch more specific tags rather than have 300 things lumped into 'random'.

I'm going to do one more "30 Days of" thing, I think. I do like that format; it reminds me to actually post more than once every two weeks. This theme-- cybercasting!

And now, to bed.

So Kaylee needed to be changed, and I told her to go get me a diaper. She picks one up from where she scattered them all last night, holds it out to me--

And I see, about three inches away from her hand, a good-sized brown spider crouching inside the fold of the diaper.

I snatched it away from her and headed for the front door, which the spider apparently took as a threat. It scurried out to the top of the diaper and reared up. I unlocked the front door in one hell of a hurry before it could decide to try a Flying Squirrel Tackle and shook it out into the grass.

Not even noon, and I've already had one heart attack. Yay.

That is not a good way to wake up.

I come in here to check my mail like I do every morning, and I hear a weird noise. Look around, nothing. Figure I must be imagining it, turn back to the computer--

And a minute later I look up and see a bumblebee hovering around my light.

I didn't know I could move that fast, especially before 6 a.m.

So I tear downstairs and send Chris up here to kill it, and a few moments later he opens the door and tells me there's nothing in here. Now neither of us can find it. Probably because the stupid thing is lying in wait for me.

*glances down at previous entry* Um . . . yeah. Happy belated St. Patrick's Day, everybody.

You know it's Monday when you wake up, your foot hurts, and you find out the problem is a splinter that will. not. come. out. Rrrr. I will take this as an excuse to sit around all day. ;-)

On the good-news side, the former rental house is cleaned up now, and listed with a realtor. Fingers crossed that it sells quickly; it'll be nice to have it out of our hair.

Saw a black widow spider yesterday (not inside, thank goodness). I knew they lived in the area but I hadn't seen one up close in years-- Ashley tried to get a picture of it with her cell phone before it got squished. They're really pretty, in a scary way.

The last time I saw them was in Denver. I was pretty young, visiting my cousins, and we were playing in the backyard. Their basement windows had decorative-rock lined pits underneath them that were the perfect size for us to use as foxholes. My cousin and I leapt down into one and looked around-- black widows all over the place.

It was one of those moments where my brain was split between, "This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen" and "Help."

I love seeing most of the wildlife that comes with living on the edge of town-- the deer, the raccoons, the manymany squirrels. However, I hate the spiders.

I walked into the bathroom yesterday evening and guess what's sitting next to the bathtub. It was smaller than some of the others we've had, but the coloring's the same. Fortunately, none of them have been spotted upstairs (where the bedroom is) or we'd be moving. ;-)

I managed to get a quick picture of this one. Then I beat it to death with my shoe.

( Picture cut for arachnophobes )

Normally, I'm all for catch-and-release, but not in this case. I have never seen spiders move as fast as these do.

Incident #1:

I'm in the rental store, searching for another low-budget horror movie to either appreciate or laugh at, when I hear a girl's voice say, "Oooh! RENT!"

And then she proceeds to sing part of "No Day But Today".

Her mother: *gives her a 'what the heck' look*
I: *give her a thumbs-up*
She: *grins*

My people. :-D

Incident #2:

My husband is over at a friend's house. Said friend is about three sheets to the wind, as are most of the others there. The talk turns (as it usually does with a drunk crowd) to sex.

Girl 1: "So how many people have you slept with?"
My husband: "None. I'm a virgin."
The first girl seems to be pondering this, when--
Girl 2: "Nuh-uh! I know you. You're married."
Girl 1: "Dammit!"
My husband's friend: "There go your plans for the night!" *starts laughing, falls off his chair*

Incident #3:

My brother's stayed the night, watching some aforementioned low-budget horror movies with us. In the morning, he sees the cat stalking something in the kitchen. It turns out to be a spider. A biiiiig spider.

My brother: *runs into the kitchen, grabs an empty pizza box, throws it at the spider from a foot away-- and misses*
Me: *laughing so hard I can't see*
My brother: *also laughing, while backing away from Shelob* "Shut up!"
Me: *picks up the pizza box and smashes the spider*

We measured it once it was dead-- four inches. I've been on the lookout for relatives ever since.

The house had gotten to that point where both people look at the dishes and the paperwork covering the table, sigh, look at each other, and then find another movie to watch and ignore the mess for one more day.

I got home from work today and found that Chris had completely cleaned the house-- dishes done, a load of laundry, the table's cleaned off and he bought some flowers and they're in a vase in the middle. :-)

Which, don't get me wrong, is a veryvery good thing. But it had the unintended consequence of disturbing the bug life.

I walked out into the living room a little while ago and suddenly found myself nose-to-whatever-the-heck-spiders-have with a little yellow arachnid. I reached to the side, grabbed a decorative box, scooped him out of the air, and took him out onto the lawn.

Well, that was just the sneak preview. The main feature, I found out about half an hour later, was on the ceiling in the little doorway alcove, plotting my death.

I was peacefully reading my book when I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye, and discovered this black lump on the ceiling. We have a sunken doorway, and so the little part of floor that'd put me within swatting distance would also put me within 'no way it's not going to fall on my head when it dies' distance. No flyswatter to be found, anyway. So I get something else, and then call mom--

Me: "Hey. You know that ant spray we have? Would it work on a spider?"
Mom: "What size spider?"
Me: "Shelob."
Mom: "Well, it'd probably startle it enough to make it fall off the wall so you can squish it, anyway."
Me: *spray*
Mom: "Did it work?"
Me: "No, I think I just made it mad." *sprays again*
Spider: *starts to fall, catches itself and hangs there, making rude gestures with one of its legs*
Me: "Eeeeeeeeeeee, it's dangling!!" *sprays frantically*
Spider: *falls, scurries toward me*
Me: *whimper*
Mom: "You do have your shoes on, right? Stomp on it."
Me: "Yeah, that'd be getting a part of my body way too close." *picks up security bar from underneath the door handle and smashes the spider. About twenty-three times*
Mom: "I think it's dead, dear."
Spider: *twitch*
Me: "Aaaa!" *SMASHCRUSHKILL*

So now it is dead, and its disgusting little body is in a small plastic container (because I am not going to do battle without showing the spoils to Chris before I incinerate them). I still feel like something's crawling on me, though. Gah. At least LOST is on in an hour.

Ohhh man, this is exactly why I stay inside most of the day.

Chris is home, after helping his parents start demolishing their house to make room for a double-wide (storm damaged the house beyond repair) and he said that while they were working on tearing it down, he hears his cousin Kevin say, "Oh fuck", and so he turned around to see what was going on-- he'd disturbed a nest of black hornets. Chris backed away slowly-- Kevin, meanwhile, was already across the yard and in the road, which is exactly what I would've done, fled at the speed of sound-- and amazingly enough, nobody got stung.

But still. Ughhhh.