Arrrghlghlghl...! Kill it with FIRE...!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

YEEEURGH! I have had one of those really disgusting experiences that only a reasonable amount of strong alcohol will make me forget!

I am coming home after working late, it is dark-ish already. Ah, summer nights… Relatively warm (for the latitude here), quiet, kinda relaxing… Hm, I will have to do something with the unchecked growth of insane plants I have on the short path that leads to my door; they are growing too much and closing like a tunnel…!

I am about to reach my door, when, WTF? I feel something really weird and sorta sticky all over my face! I am mid-stride so I walk through, the motion-activated door light activates, and I realize that I have just walked through the BIGGEST MOTHERFUCKING SPIDERWEB I’VE EVER SEEN (which, I swear, was NOT there that morning!! How on EARTH do those arthropods build them so bloody FAST??). Not only that, my mouth was half-opened, and I got a fucking MOUTHFUL of it!

And the owner of the place? I realize that I have a spider WALKING on my face! A spider that my mind’s eye made into the size of a fucking giant mutant antropophagous tarantula which possibly was pissed off beyond all recognition because I have just wrecked its home!

Aaaaand, that is when I lost it. The neighbours must still be wondering who was slaughtering a pig at 10PM in the street.

Sooo, any stories of yours that you might want to share? If only to comfort me with the knowledge that I am not alone in having freaked out in this (or comparable) circumstances…?

2

You do play WoW, right? That was the bestest murloc imitation EVER!

My flat came with a choco, a storage room/kitchen/garage in the ground floor. Whenever I visit, I open its door, give it an airing, look for signs of rodents, etc. When I say “I open its door”, picture doing some strange gymnastics to get it to opendamnit, followed by a sudden push and a sweep of the opening with a broom while I remind myself that I am not afraid of spiders any more, am not, am not, am aaaarghhhh not afraid of spiders and seriously often it isn’t even actual webs but cobwebs but no, I really am not afraid of spiders any more. Seriously!

3

I don’t have that much against spiders, but I’m really starting to hate small, evil rodents, particularly those that apparently square dance in my attic. I have to steel myself to investigate because I just know that when I open that little panel in the ceiling and cautiously raise my head through the opening, a whole ring of them will be waiting, surrounding the door, ready to pounce.

Little bastards.

4

If something’s walking across my face, I’m not sure I’d kill it with fire.

5

My old Jeep was infested with spiders. It was awful.

6

Here’s mine:

The story starts that I was traveling all last week. Got home Friday. I had missed my SO a lot, we ended up staying up until 4 Am on Saturday night, playing games or whatever. I got up on Sunday truly bleary-eyed, around 10 AM.
We had breakfast and some coffee, and played some Borderlands. Aronud 11:30 or 12 I decided I wanted a snack, and I knew I had some delicious radishes.
I got up, got them out of the fridge, got the cutting board out and the knife, and chopped all of their heads and tails off, and went to wash them.

Now on the countertop I had left the foil tamper-proof top from a creamer bottle. Bad habit, I know, but it happens. It was about six inches from my hand.

As I went to turn on the water I noticed a GIANT HONKIN CENTIPEDE apparently licking the creamer off of the top. I didn’t even know they liked sweet stuff.

I am generally good with bugs and don’t scream, except for centipedes and silverfish. I screamed. Like a little girl.

The SO heard me scream and immediately recognized the type of scream, and dropped the controller and I heard him shout, “What’s in there?”

He came running in. I babbled something like “centipede on the counter lickING CREAMER KILL IT!” He’s all “Keep an eye on it!” And I’m incoherent. All I could think of is that creepy ass thing was SIX INCHES away from my hand the whole time and I just hadn’t noticed it because of my bleariness.

He comes back with a flyswatter and smacks the thing down, and then cleans it up for me.

In retrospect, I feel a little bad for the bug. He wasn’t bothering me. he was probably all shocked when I screamed, like, “Dude, what the fuck? I wasn’t doing any-AAAAAAAAAAA!”

Had the willies all day long.

7

As you can surely imagine, I was not exactly rational at the time :stuck_out_tongue:

8

Okay, first of all, these days I walk around our place outside, waving my arms in front of me in a protective motion. That way I can find the spiderwebs with my hands, not my face. I know it looks weird, but I don’t care. The spiders are in extreme web-building mode.

Second:

Summer night. Alcoholic beverage. Cigarettes. Book. Wearing a light nightgown. Bliss! Sitting in the little fenced back patio of the townhouse where we lived. Felt something on my inner leg, just below knee. Absently brush at it–silly mosquitoes!–while reading, sipping, smoking. Repeat. Several times. Finally, draw nightie up, glance down, and

**IEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAUUUUUUUAGH! UGH! UGH!! UGH!!! **

Rise up into mid-air, screaming, flailing at myself, dancing around wildly (still holding a drink in one hand, if I recall correctly) to remove the LITTLE BABY SLUG THAT HAD PASSED THE KNEE AND WAS HEADING UP ELSEWHERE ALONG MY INNER THIGH.

I have not yet recovered.

9

I’ve posted this before, but it fits neatly here …

'Reminds me of a story - many years ago, when I was a carefree teen, I went camping with some friends of mine in a ravine near Toronto. Our brilliant idea was to drop lots of acid and then enjoy the night camping.

Unfortunately, we took the acid before fully setting up camp - meaning, when night fell, we didn’t have enough firewood. You really need a campfire to enjoy yourself, and the thought of doing without was too horrible, when tripping, to contemplate … so me and this friend of mine volunteered to collect firewood. In the dark. With flashlights.

Well, this friend of mine was really afraid of spiders and spiderwebs - a true phobia … I think you can see where this is going. While out in the dark, he stepped right into a spiderweb spun across the path. Being tripping, he didn’t know what it was exactly, but of course he feared the worst … in a voice on the verge of panic, he asked me to examine him with the flashlight.

Well, the front wasn’t so bad, just a few strands of web. I brushed those off. Then he turned around - and it was just like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark (or at least, so it seemed to me - but then, I was tripping too!). His back (fortunately covered with a jacket) was covered in a mass of spiderweb-stuff, and an egg casing had obviously burst open, disgorging what appeared to be thousands of little spiderlings, all moving about in a writhing, churning crowd.

Meanwhile, he was saying in, a voice tight with fear, “is it okay? Is there anything there?”

I lied. I said, no, just a coupla strands of web, nothing to worry about … and best I could, I brushed it all away with my hand. I had the feeling that if I’d told the truth, he’d have cracked and run sreaming into the night .’

10

Well, darn. I’d started a very similar thread just a little while before this one, but it sunk like a stone so I’ll put my story here instead.

My worst creepy-crawly incident happened when I was about 5 or so. I was on my front porch, playing with a pill bug (roly poly) with one hand and eating popcorn with the other.

I got my hands confused. Same amount of crunch, totally different flavor.

11

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!! This thread reminds me that it’s time have my house exterminated again before those fuckers start coming in for the winter. Hate, hate, hate 'em and being single, there’s no one around to kill them for me.

12

Two weeks ago - sleeping beside my husband in our cottage. Suddenly, without provocation the sting of a thousand bees precisely where my upper inner thigh meets my girlie place. I grab the offender instantly and yank it off of me, flinging it onto the bed between sleeping man and myself.

Sleeping man rises to the challenge, without even waking up, and he smacks, smacks, smacks the bed until the wee nasty is airborne. I never did see what the fuck it was - and I did want to know because we don’t have fire ants here, but I swear it felt like what I suspect a fire ant feels like.

I couldn’t sleep in the bed for the next two nights I was so freaked out.

Millipedes are common in my 150 year-old house. Many an early summer morning I’ll find one in the kitchen sink, surprised that I want to make coffee at 5 a.m. I have an evil method of offing them, I turn on the hot water and chase the buggers around the sink until the full force of the heat curls them up into little balls. That is the fate of the kitchen millipedes - I don’t want them in my sink - that’s all. The ones in the rest of the house amuse me.

I stumbled to the bathroom one night and flipped on the light - whilst sitting on the toilet I notice something not moving on the wall just next to my right shoulder. I believe it thought I didn’t see it there - looking for the world like a brown mustache on my cream coloured wall. It didn’t as much as wave an antennae or whatever the heck those are.

13

Another, from my days working in my parent’s pottery studeo as a teen - this was in a basement, and it had lots of house centipedes living there.

One day, I spotted a whopper of a centipede - must have been a full three inches long, or bigger. I grabbed a handful of wet clay and let fly - my aim was true, and with a ‘smack’ that centipede was history.

I put that handful of clay on a drying shelf, meaning to throw it out later, and promptly forgot about it.

Well, this studeo was very crowded with stuff and disorganized … it must have been a year later when one of my mother’s employees was cleaning up the drying shelves. I was working in the back, making a sculpture, when I heard a horrible scream of pure terror and the sound of stuff breaking - I ran in to find the employee cursing as she cleaned up a bunch of broken sculptures. She had found that lump, picked it up, and discovered the dried corpse of that huge centipede imbedded in it, touching her hand; her reaction was to fling it away as hard as possible - unfortunately, into some drying sculptures.

14

The other night I heard something rustling about in my kitchen trash, and though I was a little afraid to look, I thought it best to investigate. I looked, and there it was. Eww eww eww! Great white shark! A HUGE freakin’ shark, there in my kitchen!

OK, maybe not. But I occasionally get a mouse moving in. I have one now. And one of my fears is running into something… bigger. Like a rat. Or a badger. Or a wolverine. Or a bear. Or a shark.

Ah well, I 'm going on vacation tomorrow, where the worst thing I will run into (and I definitely will) is skunks.

15

Nice – I read the thread title and the first sentence on mouseover, and immediately thought “Whoop…looks like someone just walked into a big-ass spiderweb”.

16

We would get some house centipedes in our condo. I would always tell myself “they are good little creatures. They eat things like spiders and wasps. They don’t hurt people, yadda, yadda, yadda.” Still, those long legs make them look HUGE and dang they can run! Walking into a room and seeing something that big fly across the floor under the couch makes me turn around and find something else to do. I also found that if you do manage to smack one it will leave a big enough mess that your wife will notice the remains of it on the wall…

17

I love bugs for the most partm but I have an irrational, all-consuming phobia of spiderwebs. Some summer days I just can’t even go outside, because they’re everywhere and the sunlight means I can see all of them. Accidentallt walking into/near one can leave me sobbing on the ground. So trust me, I not only understand how you feel, I’d probably have freaked out worse.

18

I salute you for your compassion as you held someone else’s sanity in the palm of your hand. The difference between us, unfortunately, is that I would have been tempted to say there were spiders even if there weren’t.

19

Earlier this year, Mrs. Bergkamp was driving home from running errands and a police car turned its lights on behind her. She had no idea why she was being stopped, but dutifully pulled over and lowered her window. The officer stepped up to the door and said “Ma’am, I apologize for this, but you’re not in any trouble. I just wanted to let you know that you have a very large spider inside your car.”

Apparently, the spider was on one of the rear windows and the officer saw it while idling next to Mrs. Bergkamp’s car at a stoplight. While she watched, he opened the back door and scraped the spider off the window onto the ground. She says it was about four inches in diameter, including the legs. The officer was worried she’d see it and panic even though, based on her description it was probably a common wolf spider. They’re harmless, but she probably would have panicked, because she does not like spiders at all.

Now, when we’re driving around in her car, I’ll occasionally say “I wonder where that spider came from … and whether there are any more of them.” It’s fun to see her get all jumpy.

20

Sounds like a Gary Larson punchline. :smiley:

Seriously, I’d be thinking ‘just how large a spider could it be, for a cop to see it while driving past?!’ :smiley: