I was changing the outside light in the carport earlier tonight. It should be noted for extra shudders that I noticed that the light fixture was full of insect corpses, and I resolved to empty them out when I changed the light bulb.
What I didn’t notice is that there is a little rim around the fixture proper, and that the rim is perfect for holding zillions of dead bugs in various states of decomposition.
So there I am on the ladder, distractedly thinking of something else, and staring intently up at the light fixture I’m unscrewing. Well sir, I had my best workmanlike/mouth-drooling moron face on. You know the one, mouth half open, tongue sort of half stuck out the side as I worked the rusty, stubborn mechanism.
Yeah. You see where this is going.
Suddenly the fixture came off, and with it came a huge cascade of bug corpses. My face was covered. They went all down my shirt. No problem. But it felt like sseveral hundred of them poured right onto my tongue and into my open mouth. Desiccated mosquitos, mummified houseflies, decomposed moths, and god only knows what else.
My first apartment when I moved to Japan was absolutely infested with spiders. There were also, presumably, lots of other bugs for the spiders to eat, but it was the spiders that bothered me. I’m an arachnophobe, and those bastards just simply hang there. Walking up the one flight of stairs to my apartment, I counted over 50 of them. Small, fat ones, with bodies about the size of my fingernail, just waiting in their webs right at my head level.
But that wasn’t my worst encounter.
One night, I was watching TV with all the lights turned out. Suddenly, I saw a huge spider silhouette walking across the screen. From legtip to legtip it was about 5 inches across. I would have screamed but I think I was in the process of having a heart attack. I quickly turned on the light, grabbed something big and heavy with which to do battle (easier said than done, this sucker looked big enough to fight back!).
All in all, it’s a good thing that my downstairs neighbor was a photoshop that was closed for the night, and my next-door neighbors were both bar mamas who worked all night. Otherwise I’m sure police would have been called to investigate all the screaming and pounding. I didn’t sleep much that night.
I heard later about an exterminator in the states that was making fake commercials that would be interrupted by a real-looking bug crawling across the screen. I’m actually glad that that wasn’t the case here. Had I seen a spider that big and then not seen where it went, I wouldn’t have slept for weeks.
That reminds me of an encounter a friend had with a mega-spider. He was in the tub, relaxing and reading a book, and he looked over the edge of it, straight up into the corner of the bathroom. He saw a smallish black spot in the corner. Unable to tell what it was, and curious, he continued watching it for a little while until suddenly, several large legs unfolded from the center mass, and it revealed itself to be a massive spider. He immediately went into battle mode, stood up and grabbed the toilet plunger, and swiped at the spider. Unfortunately, because of its precarious position, he only managed to nudge it…juuuuuust hard enough to knock it out of the corner and into the sudsy bathwater in which he was still standing. At that moment, blind panic took over, and he began kicking - with predictable results. The bathroom was utterly soaked, and he somehow managed to kick the spider out of the tub without harming it, because he never saw it again. He doesn’t think it went down the drain, but he’s convinced that, to this day, that spider is stalking him.
I live in an old house and my windows are open, so some bugs get in from time to time. I have a few spiders that occassionally take up residence in a corner here or there. Well apparently one of them had babies recently, because I went into my bathroom the other day and noticed scores of tiny little spiders all over the ceiling! :eek: I sprayed the ceiling with insect killer, and some of them started rapelling down from the ceiling on their little spider webs right onto me! Well, after a while I think the poison killed them all because I haven’t seen any more recently.
I normall don’t mind spiders too much, but dozens of little tiny baby ones are NOT A GOOD THING!!
I walked into my bathroom a few days ago, and there was a big-ass spider just sitting in the sink! Like, two inches big. I’m not real squeamish, but I didn’t grow up in Florida, and I don’t know what kinds of spiders are poisonous and which aren’t. Unfortunately for this spider, he was dumb enough to stay there while I went to get a paper towel to squish him into ex-spiderdom.
I don’t have any phobias, so I can only try to understand how people feel when confronted with the object of their terror. But one time, my brother’s girlfriend came running over to our house screaming and crying and hyperventilating because there was a spider in her bedroom in the basement. She couldn’t go back into the house until it was dead. So I went over there, and looked all over, and it was this itty-bitty little brown spider that couldn’t have been any bigger than a fingernail. Squish. Gone. But the hysterics were truly something to behold!
I was crawling through a, well, crawlspace, and it was incredibly hot and I was gasping for air and my mask was so caked with gunk that I could hardly breathe through it. So, what do I do? Well, I take off the mask. Then what do I do? I turn my head. And what do I discover? That a post-spider-meal insect will actually dissolve in your mouth.
That reminds me of an encounter a friend had with a mega-spider. He was in the tub, relaxing and reading a book, and he looked over the edge of it, straight up into the corner of the bathroom. He saw a smallish black spot in the corner. Unable to tell what it was, and curious, he continued watching it for a little while until suddenly, several large legs unfolded from the center mass, and it revealed itself to be a massive spider. He immediately went into battle mode, stood up and grabbed the toilet plunger, and swiped at the spider. Unfortunately, because of its precarious position, he only managed to nudge it…juuuuuust hard enough to knock it out of the corner and into the sudsy bathwater in which he was still standing. At that moment, blind panic took over, and he began kicking - with predictable results. The bathroom was utterly soaked, and he somehow managed to kick the spider out of the tub without harming it, because he never saw it again. He doesn’t think it went down the drain, but he’s convinced that, to this day, that spider is stalking him.