I am dead tired. I should have went to bed an hour or so ago, but I’ve been reading my CSI board because the season premiere was tonight.
So I finally decide to go to bed. I go to rifle through the stack of books next to my bed to find the one I want to read before I doze off.
I pick up Chelsea Handler’s “My Horizontal Life” and see a huge ass spider. I HATE bugs, especially ones with 6+ legs. This one, legs and all, was maybe between dime and nickel sized. Big enough to see and feel if he crawled on me!
I run and get the smelly Raid. It took so much poison I think I actually drowned him in the liquid rather than poisoned him. He. would. not. die.
So now I’m flipping out. There could be more! One could be in my bed! They could be freely coming in through some crack by the window I don’t know about! His buddies might want revenge! Argh.
This is particuarly distressing because once I did wake up to find I had smushed an even larger spider in my bed while I slept. Traumatized me.
I knew I shouldn’t have moved into an apartment with a wooded area behind it…damn this place and its cheap rent!
Blah I am freaking out and my roommate is already asleep so I can’t freak her out too. We’ve already killed too many oversized bugs in this place. And we had a swarm of Japanese ladybugs in our dorm last year. Damned bugs, damn all you to hell!
Even when I quit spazzing and get to sleep, it smells like Raid in here and it stinks.
The only useful application I’ve found for a bottle of Raid is blunt force trauma. I’ve rolled over several creepy-crawlies with it and I must say that banging the hell out of your dresser in hopes of incapacitating the itsy bitsy spider is far more effective than letting the foul-yet-surprisingly-ineffective poison escape from the nozzle, leaving you both paranoid AND nauseous. shudder
You know what works better than Raid? For all bugs?
Hairspray or lysol.
I’m not kidding. Why fork out five bucks for Raid when you can fork out two for a generic bottle of hairspray or one for some generic lysol? Works like a dream.
I gave up on my arachnophobia years ago - every gorram night of the week there’d be a spider somewhere in my room, it was get used to them or never sleep again, I can ignore them as long as they don’t move and if they’re anywhere near the bed I use the glass and postcard method to throw them out the window…
Shouldas just used the book to crush the spider. That’s what I did when I was visiting out West and a wolf spuider the size of my hand came crawling over. I figured my trade edition-sized copy of The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee was sturdy enough to have spider guts wiped off without ill effect, and I was right. I deliberately didn’t think about the possibility of others. Spiders aren’t known to be vindictive (“My name is Shelob. You killed by Father. Prepare to Die.”)
In the morning, my hosts told me I should’ve just left the spider – the cats would have played with, then killed it. So there was already an anti-spider mechanism working.
Sounds like you need to visit your local home and garden center and get some spray for the perimeter of your house. I used some of this stuff around my house and let me tell you, it works like a charm. Just thought you might like to know there’s an alternate to getting squizzed out nightly.
Another cheap bug killer whenever you don’t want to use a glass and postcard is just a spray bottle with a soap solution–dish soap and shampoo are both effective. Useful for all sorts of little creatures who’ve wound up somewhere you don’t want them.
jpt
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