Oh. My. God.
While I am deeply sorry about you getting slashed to ribbons, the whole spider story made me squirt dnL out my nose while I was reading it.
Thanks for the laugh,Payton.
IDBB
Penny-Arcade made a strangely apt comic on this subject, entitled He’s got legs!
I would be honored.
Well and truly honored.
Thank you very much.
Hey, what’s crawling on your shoulder?
D&R;)
Whew, Payton! I’m glad you’re okay. Reading this thread forther reinforced my habit of shaking every garment before putting it on.
I have a 1/4" wide crater-shaped scar on my leg from a run-in with a brown recluse. It had taken up residence in a pair of jeans in my closet, and took a dim view of me stuffing my leg into its home.
Your tale made me shudder, but it also made me smile.
Hope you’re feeling better soon.
Well, my room is to put it kindly, a semi-wreck, and it was probably in the clothes basket.
We did have the exterminator come out and he poked and prodded, and actually found 2 more widows, but they were down in the basement, and seemed to be at least semi happy in their webs, so they were spared for the time being.
The exterminator did spray and told us to keep an eye on the ones in the basement.
I do shake out my clothes every morning now.
Actually, it’s pretty hard to get a widow to bite you, you can hold one in your hand, and it takes a good bit for them to get pissed off enough to bite. 'Course I’m not going to be the one who sees exactly how pissed off it needs to get before it bites.
I’ll leave that up to you.
Oh, you’re far too kind.
Will you also be footing my hospital bills?
There’s really nothing one can say, except that was the funniest fucking thing I’ve read in a long time. GREAT STORY!!!
Oh, and sorry to hear about your physcial injuries and such. That sucked.
But it was still funny 
Hey, Payton’s Servent, just be glad I’m not the one you called for a ride to the hospital.
BTW, good luck, and heal well!
Best,
Winston
Wow, great story! I think the lesson learned here is that you need a dresser to keep your clothes in! And keep your room neat with NOTHING on the floor!
Also, I always thought that those glass shower doors had to be shatter-proof or something like that for safety reasons. Time to get a shower curtain!
I actually don’t mind spiders, as long as they are not on me or near me. I cannot kill a spider…usually I will trap it and release it outside. However recently I flushed a spider down the toilet and I felt really guilty.
One of the scariest spiders I have seen was in the laundry room of my old apartment building. It was a jumping spider, and it could leap like a foot in the air, and a foot in distance. When it saw me, it started jumping towards me in a threatening manner! Yikes!
That reminds me of something FAR SCARIER than a spider: dubbed the “evil bug.” It’s real name is not known. This is a creature I have never seen before util I moved to a new apartment in another state a couple of years ago. The first time I saw it in that same laundry room, I was shocked, stunned, frightened and fascinated. I had never seen anything like it…
Let me try to describe it…it’s long, with many legs, similar to a millipede, but not as long. Maybe 2-3 inches full grown. However, the legs are LONG and skinny, not short, like a millipede. And the resemble cricket legs. There are dozens of legs. It’s dark brown in color. It is the most horrifyingly scary bug I have ever seen…and it scurries really fast which makes it hard to catch and kill.
Well seeing them in the laundry room was one thing, but when they started turning up in our BEDROOM, that was a whole other thing! My boyfriend was the first to discover one on the wall. Even he was TERRIFIED! I wouldn’t go in the room until it was safely killed. Other times, I would attack with bug spray…boy did it take a lot of bug spray to kill those bastards. Every night before bed I would check the sheets to make sure I wouldn’t be sleeping with one. And I would NEVER leave any clothes on the floor.
Anyway, does ANYONE know what these creatures are??? I have only ever seen them in Maryland, and never in Virginia where I am from and where I live now.
P.S. Payton’s Servant: Are you crazy??? Why would you allow those remaining two widows remain in your basement??? They will only breed more widows to try to attack you again!!
:eek:
I take back all my sympathy.
Are you MAD, man???
One day several years ago my sister went to take a bath and my dad heard her screaming. She then dashed out of the restroom wearing nothing but a towel. It turned out there was a huge wolf spider in the tub; my dad promptly sent it to spider heaven.
A few years later I was visiting my parents. They were at work and I got bored being by myself; I decided the best way to deal with boredom would be to chug several cans of beer. I was well into the beer and cheerfully listening to The Fall when I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and there was a wolf spider the size of my hand sitting on the couch staring at me.
If I had been sober I probably would have hit the ceiling but as I had a good buzz on I just said “What’s the matter, mister spider, are you lost,” then got a towel out of the bathroom and threw it over the spider. I waited a few seconds for it to cling to the towel, then opened the front door and threw it and the towel onto the bushes in the front yard. I never saw it again so I presume it went on its merry way, its life saved by my alcoholism.
Yeah, I’ve been having 2nd thoughts about having the widows in the house. Either I or my dad check them everyday, and we agreed that if we see that either of them has an egg sack, then it’s time to get the spray out.
But that plan may change, as I’m fairly sure we have other spiders in the house which aren’t venemous. (Well, they would be venemous, just not to humans or dogs.;))
My dad and I are going to discuss it after I get back from my class tonight.
birdgirl, did your critters look like this? If so, they were house centipedes.
I had never seen one of these in my life until we went to France on vacation. I suppose they don’t like California. Anyway, we rented a vacation home in a little village in the middle of nowhere. The first night, I got up to pee, and as I was sitting there, one landed with a moist-sounding plop on the floor right in front of me. I didn’t know that my sphincters could shut off so quickly in mid-pee; and my fright was nothing compared to the horror I felt when, on looking up, I realized the charming old picturesque beams which composed the ceiling were crawling with the monsters.
The next morning, Mr. Pug and I checked out tout de suite and checked into a clean hotel in the nearest town.
I really, really wish I hadn’t clicked on that link.
I’ve never had a spider in my pants. Being in Florida, however, I have had my obligatory share of cockroaches in my shoes.
It coulda been worse. It coulda been…THIS!!!
STUPID STUPID STUPID ME…I knew I shouldn’t have clicked on either of those links, but curiosity got the better of me.
I won’t be sleeping for a few nights now.
Wait a second… that guy lists “photo retouching” as one of the things he does, and if you click on that, you’ll see he’s done some pretty convincing work with a shark. So I’m not entirely sure that the bug is real.
On the other hand, that fact that a bug like that could exist at even 1/1000th that size is not making me feel better.
I thought that those were silverfish. Damned icky, regardless.
My Spider Story:
In high school, I worked at McDonald’s. I usually closed on Friday and Saturday nights. You got paid more, and, well, I really didn’t have other pressing plans.
Anyway, got home from work, and entered the back door into the kitchen. Turned on the light, opened the fridge, and looked down. Right near the edge of the fridge, I see a fairly large spider. It’s not threatening me, I’m not threatening it. It’s not really a stand-off, it’s more like a “Hey. Howzit goin’?”
Then, I look closer at the spider. I notice a brown violin on its back. “Hmmm,” I think. “I believe that’s a brown recluse. That’s probably not the best thing to just be running around free.”
Now, I have a policy that will probably sicken many people on this thread: I don’t kill spiders. Ever. I just don’t. I figure that if I see a spider or two, but I don’t see any other insects in the house, the spiders are doing just fine. Small ones get to hang out wherever they please. Big 'uns, such as the rare wolf spider, are caught and released outside.
Back to our friend, the recluse.
This is not my first encounter with a brown recluse spider. In junior high, the biology teacher had a whole family of them. It seems that a recluse had fallen into an empty aquarium and couldn’t get out. Recluses can’t climb up glass. His was a female, she laid eggs, they hatched, the miracle of life continues.
Remembering this little tidbit – they can’t climb up glass – I grabbed an empty jelly jar, placed it over the top of the spider, slid a piece of paper underneath the jar, did a fancy flip, and voila! Spider problem solved.
I thought this would be a neat thing to bring to school, so I put a lid on the jar and put the jar in the fridge, forcing hibernation. Brought the spider to school, was hailed as a hero, all that good stuff.
Then, I found another recluse. Strangely enough, in the same spot as the first – right next to the fridge. So, I decided to study it.
THINGS I LEARNED:
-
Brown recluses are territorial and nocturnal. They don’t just roam around your house, and they hide in the daytime. They find a spot and stay there. Of course, the name is a pretty big clue, too.
-
Brown recluses can not only live in the kitchen, but in the bathroom (so wear shoes late at night), in another part of the kitchen, and, once, in your sister’s shoe. If a brown recluse lives in your sister’s shoe, it’s ok to kill it. The spider, not the shoe.
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SOMETHING was doing damage to the recluses in my house. ALL of the specimens I found had only seven legs. Either they were preying on each other… or there was something tougher than recluse venom in my house!
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That’s about it, since “studying their behavior” basically meant standing and looking at them for like 10 minutes at a time before I went to bed and/or captured and released them outside.
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I am pretty fucking stupid to just let one of the deadliest spiders in North America just hang out in my house where it could kill family members not hipt to its prescence. (Of course, I did tell the family where not to walk at night.)
So, my whole not killing spiders policy? Out the fucking door if a black widow crawls out of my pants. Cripes. There’s tolerance, and then there’s protecting… well, your naughty bits were apparently fine at that point… protecting bits of you that you don’t want dead.
I can deal with tiny spiders okay, especially since I have a slight ant problem sometimes, and the little wispy “charlotte” type spiders are okay. Anything approaching the size of a dime starts to creep me out. But you should see my sister…
She is TERRIFIED of spiders, such that she can’t even move if she sees one. She actually has to force herself to breathe, since she doesn’t want to pass out around one. She once gave herself a concussion because she sat on a spider about 2mm big, cracked her head on the back window of the car, all the while screeching like a banshee.
GrinnaSister was in an outdoor drama here in Ohio. Right before the big death scene, she noticed a big spider (about the size of the top of a can of soda, although the size if it varies occasionally) was waiting in the wings with her. Mr Spider hung around looking at her , obviously planning on trying to make her forget her staging. Her friend grabbed her arm and pulled her away, but as GrinnaSister started moving towards her spot, realized Mr Spider was following her.
Unfortunately, this particular death scene ended up with GrinnaSister on the ground after she had been killed, and Mr Spider was keeping a close watch on her. The lights went out, all the dead people (exept for GrinnaSister) got up and moved off stage. GrinnaSister conquered her fear of spiders for a brief moment and got up, RAN to the wings, where she says she proceeded to do the screaming heebiejeebie dance, which involves, saying something like “aaeeiieee woooahhoaoa” jumping around, and flailing her arms for a good five minutes.
Of course, since she is an actor, she tells the story much better…