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Spider in waiting

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of days ago I went to take a shower, and there was a spider in the tub. A large one (this isn’t a photo of my spider, but it looked just like it):

I couldn’t decide what to do with it. It was too big to smash, but I just didn’t feel up to performing the old cup-and-cardboard routine. So I washed up in the sink with a washcloth, and then left the bathroom and tried to forget about it.

The next time I entered, I was delighted to find that the spider had disappeared. Maybe it had even climbed out of the tub – although I knew that was unlikely, and that the steep sides made it very difficult for spiders to get out that way once trapped inside. I tried not to think about the details of where the spider might be.

The next time I entered the bathroom I happened to glance at the bathtub drain. To my horror I saw two little dots at the edge of the chrome, near one of the little holes. Could that be – two little spider feet?

In other words, had the spider crawled into a drain hole, and was it hanging there upside down, like a little trapeze artist?

My drain is of this type, by the way:

As I watched in horror, those small black dots withdrew downward into the drain. It was now unmistakable that the spider had taken up residence there. I suppose at that point I could (and should?) have run a stream of hot water, but that horrified me as well.

Maybe the thing would just crawl down and out, somehow – out into the wild beyond. Meanwhile, I left the bathroom again.

Next time – you guessed it – the spider was back in the tub, staring at me, looking bright and chipper and not at all the worse for wear. Refreshed, even.

And so I called in the troops, in the person of a friend who bravely removed it. And I finally took a shower.

Comments

Spider in waiting — 83 Comments

  2. I’ve come to like having some spiders in my apartment. The ones I really admire, though, are the centipedes. Next to my desk, almost within arm’s reach, on the wall to my immediate left, there seems to have developed a sort of invisible highway that a lot of the little critters like to use late at night. When I’m up reading posts like this one, I see them travel there sometimes. Mostly centipedes use it on whatever business they’re pursuing.

    The little baby centipedes are kind of cute. They look like bits of lint until you peer at them.

  3. Well, if Neo could devote a column to the spider in the tub, and trigger a comment about the charm of centipedes, one might surmise that all is well in the world.

    But, we know that is not the case; so I put it down to escapism.

    As I have progressed into full blown geriatric status, I am more empathetic with all of God’s creatures than I once was. When walking early in the morning, the sidewalk is occasionally littered with snails commuting to or from the sprinklers–I don’t know which. I am careful not to step on them. I will also step over ants if I see them going about their busy schedules. Spiders in the house are a different story. I will remove them if is convenient; otherwise I commit spidicide. Confession, I still fish, with only occasional twinges of conscience.

  4. One night my wife and I were watching TV and suddenly my wife screamed so loud I thought the Manson family had entered the room. Well, it was a big spider dropping down from the vent in the ceiling on a string. I’ll spare y’all the details, but it was crazy trying to catch that spider with my wife screaming bloody murder the whole time!

  5. Oh, I get it!

    The tub is the swamp. The drain is, well, the drain for the swamp.

    The spider is the evil Deep State guarding the drain to prevent the draining of the swamp!

    It’s one of those meta four thingies!

  8. Baking soda, then vinegar. Also benefits the pipes by clearing them so water can drain faster.

  9. but it was crazy trying to catch that spider with my wife screaming bloody murder the whole time!

    Feel better. Somebody needs you.

  12. My wife takes the attitude that spiders OUTDOORS are OK. But the moment any spider lays one foot INSIDE the house, it has committed suicide. She usually calls me to kill them, and I’m happy to do it.

    I have less tolerance for spiders, and I kill them wherever I see them.

  13. Philip Sells on October 7, 2020 at 4:43 pm said:
    “I’ve come to like having some spiders in my apartment. The ones I really admire, though, are the centipedes. ”

    When we lived in the Philippines, we had geckos all over the place, inside and out. Geckos are cool, and they eat mosquitoes and other bugs. A friend once tied a thread around a gecko as a leash, and attached it to the head of his bed – to eat every bug near the bed.

    Now that I live in Texas, we have lots of small lizards again, and I have no problem with them.

  14. Prior to being a husband and father I typically avoided killing pests that would infiltrate my domicile. Without knowingly making a conscious change once I became “the man of the house” I instantly switched over to speedily dispatching of anything and everything that entered the shelter where my family dwelt. I remember noting the change one day and thinking it interesting that there seemed to be something innate about it; wired into my DNA.

  15. I have a running gag with engaged or newlywed couples about the “unwritten rules of marriage”. All of them directed to the man.

    You become the designated bug killer no matter how late it is.

    Wife gets to put her cold feet on you

    It is her car until something goes wrong with it. Then it becomes your car

    Is there any other unwritten rules I have forgotten?

  16. Get a black lab. They’ll eat anything. My second ex-wife routinely called my faithful hound to hover up spiders and whatnot.

  17. I would’ve killed the spider without much thought before or after.

    In Tangier, however, there was an iguana (or whatever) who was often to be found high on the opposite wall from my bed. Unmoving. Upside down? Maybe so. In any case, I experienced no animus and we left each other alone.

  18. For April Fool’s Day one year I printed out a photo of a very large hairy spider on a white background and taped it to the white tile floor of my teenage daughters’ bathroom at night before bed. Heh heh.

  19. After three boys the Mrs. and I had our first daughter and I was fascinated on differences I noted in her hard-wiring, as compared to our sons. Nurture-wise, being raised among older brothers she was fairly rough and tumble, but there were still stark, noticeable differences. Empathy, for example. She was so much more aware of all living things around her and had a capacity for love beyond her older brothers’ abilities. They were more inwardly focused.

    One day, not long after she had started stringing her first three + word sentences together I heard her proclaim, “Eek, a bug.” It wasn’t a shout, but it also wasn’t stated passively. I walked over, saw the bug, killed it and took it to the trash.

    What really amazed me about the whole thing is I am quite certain she had never encountered the word, “eek” prior. It’s certainly not a word her mother, brothers or I were in the habit of saying. I had read all our childrens’ books so many times to the kids that I knew every word in them. None of the stories had a character who said the word, “eek.” And, if she had been around anyone when they were truly caught off guard by a bug, who would state, “Eek, a bug” in such a moment of panic? People truly spooked by a bug would react like Spiderman’s wife, in the story he related above. And that includes her. If she were truly shocked and deathly afraid of the sight of the bug she would have simply screamed and/or turned and ran to me.

    What I learned from that event is that “eek” is an utterance humans make organically, like, “Ow!”, or “Oooh!”

  20. I am Sparticus,

    I have never driven a new car (except for rentals and company cars). I bought used in my penniless bachelor days, then, upon marrying, every 4 or 5 years we buy my wife a new car and I get her hand-me-down.

  22. }}} My wife takes the attitude that spiders OUTDOORS are OK. But the moment any spider lays one foot INSIDE the house, it has committed suicide. She usually calls me to kill them, and I’m happy to do it.

    I have less tolerance for spiders, and I kill them wherever I see them.

    I bought a house last year. There were not a lot of spiders around last year, but lots of bugs. This year, I’ve deliberately left the considerable number of banana spiders (aka “golden silk spiders”) in place, as long as they did not pick somewhere I regularly pass through (I have a long stick I use to snatch their webs up and move them out of the pathways if they pick a place I use). For the most part, they stop making webs in my pathways if I do this — webs are expensive for the girls, and when you destroy one it means they also go hungry.

    I have noticed a LOT fewer bugs around. I argue, thereby, that this policy, of leaving the ladies alone as long as they “behave” is a good one.

    INSIDE the house, it’s more of a size issue to me. If they are small — less than a half-centimeter, say, and not in a problem area (like part of the kitchen or somewhere I use a lot) I’ll probably leave them be. But if they are larger than that, they either get sprayed, drained, or otherwise removed.

    NEO: Probably she came up via the drain in the first place. If you wash her out with cold water, there’s a good chance she’ll be ok, if you are loathe to harm her.

    P.S., To the best of my knowledge: if you see a spider, chances are, it’s a female. The males tend to be much smaller than the females. And if it makes a web, it’s a female, posdef. The web thing is akin to functional mammaries in mammals. There will often be other small spiders in a web — these are either males, or sometimes “parasite” spiders hanging around looking to steal a giblet or two from the house mother and get away with it (if she catches one, it’s food).

  23. One night, when I used to love in California, my cat was doing his “mighty hunter” routine. I figured it was a bug. Or a lizard. I was no prepared for what it was: a six inch long myriapod. Centipede, millipede, I don’t know, but it was freaking YUUUUUUUGE!!!!

    I screamed bloody murder.

    Then I got out my vacuum cleaner, a Dyson, with the clear plastic dust collector bin canister thingie. I vacuumed up the little bastard. And afterwards, ton of diatomaceous earth, the kind used for killing fleas. I figured if it kills fleas, a cup of it would be bad news for six inch long myriapod.

    The little bastard was running laps in the bottom of the bin. (Judging by its speed, it was probably a centipede. Millipedes are supposedly slow walkers.)

    I took the whole vacuum cleaner out on the balcony, detached the bin, and emptied on to the ivy, four stories down. Hopefully between the diatomaceous earth and terminal velocity, the little bastard died. Or at least wouldn’t come back to my apartment.

    The interesting thing was, I thought, living in an apartment complex, no one seemed interested in someone screaming like they were being attacked.

  24. I Am Sparticus:

    Great rules, especially the cold foot one. That would save many a marriage 🙂 .

  25. Here in Easter WA Black Widow spiders are common, Wind Scorpions (the Camel Spiders of Iraq) less common but more fearsome looking, and scorpions present but seldom seen. Black Widow spiders are killed when found (storage sheds, outdoor electrical outlet enclosures, water well heads, wood piles), all others are left alone or taken outside when possible.

  26. Neo, you sound like Mahatma Ghandi!
    It’s a spider, one of a zillion. Just squish it.

  27. Cicero:

    I squish small spiders. I cannot squish a very large spider. This one was very large. Very. It had gone beyond the squish threshold.

  28. OBloodyHell,

    I had never heard that webspinning was a gender specific adaptation in spiders so I google’d it. The first page that came up does not agree with your statement. I’m not sure if you are right, or the author of the web article I read, but here’s that author’s take (although, the author agrees with you that a web in your home very likely means “female”):
    https://schoolofbugs.com/do-male-spiders-spin-webs/#:~:text=Yes%2C%20But%20their%20lifestyle%20isn,Every%20species%20is%20different.

    Do Male Spiders Spin Webs?
    The myth that male spiders can’t spin webs comes from the fact that they don’t do it a lot. If you see a spider on a web, you’re likely looking at a female spider. Why? Because most male spiders aren’t territorial. Rather, they spend their lives moving around looking for mates.

    Because male spiders are always on the move, a web to call home wouldn’t make much sense. Why use up their precious energy building a one when they’re going to abandon it anyway? This is why you won’t find older male spiders building webs. Younger males build their own webs before they go searching for females. But these webs are never as impressive as female spider webs are.

    But that’s for most male spiders, not all. There are thousands upon thousands of species of spiders. And they all differ from one another, sometimes in amazing ways.

  30. I Am Sparticus,

    The cold feet thing doesn’t bother me. My wife says I give off waves of heat, year round. I only use a light blanket on my side of the bed. She and both dogs (mighty dachshunds) routinely snuggle as close to me as they can in the winter but in the summer, I am pushed off to the far side of the bed.

    But if its cold, and the feet need to be warmed, the toenails must be trimmed!

    As far as spiders go, I kill them for the sake of matrimonial harmony. But I hate doing it because generally, they are helpful creatures. If the wife isn’t around to see them, I leave them be.

    Back in the day, when I worked at a grocery store in college, we had this HUGE spider hitch a ride in a banana shipment. I don’t know what kind of spider it was. I don’t think it was a tarantula. It was a bit larger than the tarantulas I have seen. The produce manager said it was fairly common to find them though they were usually dead. But not always…

  31. Spokane (2011). Just escaped to eastern Washington from California, land of black widows.

    Relaxing on the porcelain throne in the basement bathroom of our first move-in (kind of nice) rental home, calmly reading news on a tablet while nature took its course.

    Bathrooms are for reading.

    I see something moving, quickly, out of the corner of my eye. Brazenly trespassing upon my sanctum sanctorum. Something huge.

    That was my initial introduction to the giant house spider.

    Observation 1: They can… run.

    Observation 2: They are… ginormous. 3-4 inches. Monstrous aberrations of the arachnid world.

    And did I mention they’re fast?

    I had no idea such beasts existed… well, outside of Oz. A place I am determined to never visit for just that reason.

    It was a nightmare war for the next two years… until we finally purchased a place of our own (upon determination that I – a California boy who’d barely seen snow growing up – liked 4 seasons).

    Our home now has regular spiders. I can deal with regular spiders, even through my phobia.

    But I’m constantly on lookout for the Big Uns. I know they exist here.

    They shall not pass.

  32. Neo said:

    “It had gone beyond the squish threshold.”

    Beyond the Squish Threshold! Into the the Crunch Zone!

  33. Many of us carry Demodex mites in our eyelid lash follicles. These mostly don’t do anything. Sometimes itch. Mites are little arachnids with four pairs of legs. Spiders are arachnids. You can actually see these mites with a dissecting microscope.

  34. RE: “I suppose at that point I could (and should?) have run a stream of hot water, but that horrified me as well.”
    Hot water? Sure. How about some bleach or drain cleaner! You can kill wasps and hornets very fast with water and soap. (Soapy water covers the tiny pours they breathe through.)

    RE: “It was too big to smash.”
    It was bigger than a German Shepard? I’ve never seen a spider that was too big to smash, and I’ve kept a tarantula that was several inches across. (Mom and Dad weren’t thrilled.)

    If all else fails, give it a face full of Raid or Black Flag.

  35. brdavis9 said:

    “I had no idea such beasts existed… well, outside of Oz. A place I am determined to never visit for just that reason.”

    I used to work with a guy who was a Navy SEAL in the 80’s, on a team that worked primarily in Central and South America. He said there was a “bird hunting” spider down there called the Goliath. It could be up to 6 inches long!

    He also said it wasn’t dangerous to humans but, like the wives, mentioned in this very thread, who warm their feet on their husbands, the Goliath spider would often settle near the SEALS face or head when they (both the SEAL and the spider) slept. The spiders wanted to rest near the SEALs body heat and warm breath. Many an inexperienced member of the team would wake up and scream like a little girl because a half foot of spider was spread across their face when they woke up. The older members would laugh. Some would even take mercy on the noob and brush the spider away.

    He said it did take some getting used to though.

  36. I needed this. I found it hilarious and shared it with others. Thanks for making my day. Now I will probably ruin it by watching the VP debates.

  38. Spiders belong outside. NOT in my house. My method is to grab a tissue, swoop down on them from above, capture, flush, all the while saying, “Sorry. You chose poorly.”

  39. “Ballooning spiders and the number of spider that are swallowed while sleeping”
    search yielded many results, such as

    https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology/arachnology-and-entomology/spider-myths/myth-you-swallow-spiders

    But I doubt that they included those who slept in a bathtub. Anyway just remember the ending to the children’s song “I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly.” “She’s dead, of course.” Moral or lesson – don’t sleep in bathtubs.

  41. Statistically speaking bathrooms are the most dangerous places in a home. Because, spiders? Outhouses must have been absolutely deadly.

  45. Neo, that looks like a garden spider, they’re good guys – they eat things that are worse than them.

    Usually I try to get spiders into a dustpan for a quick trip outdoors, unless they’re one of the 2 poisonous ones we have here.

    Once in the Caribbean we stayed with friends in an island cabin. The interior was painted all white, a common thing. That night I woke up and thought the ceiling looked a little weird, not quite as…. plain white. Yep. About 50 or so black tarantulas up there, crawling around on the ceiling [shudder].

  46. Neo:
    Big spiders? Really big spiders? Try tarantulas, which are wild in the Southern AZ desert. Females (the bigger) are 4 inches across; that’s 10 cm for those in Rio Linda. The females hang out in a hole, hardly ever move more than 3 feet away. If it don’t hustle, burning calories, it don’t need to eat much. It is the males, come spawning season, that one encounters moving about looking for the lovelies. They are only 7-8 cm diameter.
    From Wiki: “After the semen has been transferred to the receptive female’s body, the male swiftly leaves the scene before the female recovers her appetite. Although females may show some aggression after mating, the male rarely becomes a meal.”
    Tarantulas are considered delicacies in places like Venezuela. Even before Chavez. Bon appetit!

  47. In our older house we get bats inside once or twice a year. The poor things are usually exhausted by the time I realize they’re there, sometimes from the cat chasing them. Sometimes I just get them in a towel and take them outside.

    During the day, a couple of months ago, the wife was doing her work-from-home in the dining room and started squawking about a bird. I saw it was a bat, and said so. That did not sit well with this raised on a farm girl, who should know better, but. I opened the front door, and with a bit of urging the bat moved out onto the enclosed porch. By opening and closing doors, he eventually had a limited path outside. I let him rest for a little while to catch his breath. Then he figured out the way outside.

  48. This article has some interesting, spider math: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/28/spiders-could-theoretically-eat-every-human-on-earth-in-one-year/

    Spiders are quite literally all around us. A recent entomological survey of North Carolina homes turned up spiders in 100 percent of them, including 68 percent of bathrooms and more than three-quarters of bedrooms. There’s a good chance at least one spider is staring at you right now, sizing you up from a darkened corner of the room, eight eyes glistening in the shadows.

    Spiders mostly eat insects, although some of the larger species have been known to snack on lizards, birds and even small mammals. Given their abundance and the voraciousness of their appetites, two European biologists recently wondered: If you were to tally up all the food eaten by the world’s entire spider population in a single year, how much would it be?

    Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published their estimate in the journal the Science of Nature earlier this month, and the number they arrived at is frankly shocking: The world’s spiders consume somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.

    Or, for a slightly more disturbing comparison: The total biomass of all adult humans on Earth is estimated to be 287 million tons. Even if you tack on another 70 million-ish tons to account for the weight of kids, it’s still not equal to the total amount of food eaten by spiders in a given year, exceeding the total weight of humanity.

    In other words, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry.

  51. I lived in Florida for a bit; the spiders there are huge, hairy (furry?) and are real fast movers. They are so big you really don’t want to squash them because it would leave a real mess.
    That’s when copious quantities of RAID are needed -lot’s of it.

    Used to have a cat when I lived in NYC. We had these huge water bugs that frequented the bathtub, kitchen, really anywhere. Would just drop my cat near the bugs. The cat would eat the water bug. It really was a disgusting sight,, esp. the sounds of the bug’s wings / body getting crunched.

    It really is amazing what cat’s will eat.

  52. Kenneth Mitchell, your gecko comment brought back memories of Hawaii.

    Apparently cats love geckos; at least our Siamese did. The sight of the family cat stalking around the living room with half of a gecko sticking out of her mouth really freaks the girls.

  54. There is a big spider that shows up in my cabin every summer. I call her Charlotte.

  55. “Many of us carry Demodex mites in our eyelid lash follicles.” – Dnaxy.

    I didn’t have to know that.
    Rufus – you, too.

    The best spider web I ever saw was between two close-set trees in our yard in south Texas, about a 3-foot span. The spinner was a good two or three inches in diameter. Beautiful in the morning with a touch of dew in the rising sun.
    We left it alone, of course, but she moved on after a few days.
    I haven’t seen anything that big here in Colorado, which is too bad.

    I don’t miss the black widows and brown recluses, though.

  56. “I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly.” – om

    My introduction to satire.
    I wonder if kids still learn to sing it?

  57. The baking soda & vinegar thing might kill spiders, but it won’t clean your drains.
    It just looks cool.

    https://brendid.com/why-you-should-never-use-baking-soda-and-vinegar-to-clean-clogged-drains/

    It turns out my high school chemistry teacher was right… the fizzy combination of baking soda & vinegar is INEFFECTIVE when fighting grease clogged drains.

    Why? Baking soda is a base while vinegar is an acid, their chemical reaction produces water with a tiny amount of salt in it, not a fat destroying drain cleaner. Plus vinegar and baking soda are not surfactants, so they do not help water carry oil and grease away the same way that detergents can.

    The hot water does a better job melting the FOG clog and gets a kick from the degreasing power of the detergent.

  58. Scalding water should have killed it in the drain.

    I don’t tolerate pests well either. On Sunday, I killed a red squirrel which had invaded my shed and was storing walnuts there. Only about the 4th Red this season. They are particilarly hard to hit as they are both as small as chipmunks, seldom still for 3 seconds at a time, and very fast moving. This one made the mistake of pausing against a tree trunk only about 70 feet away, so the Beeman break open .177 @ 1100 fps took care of it. I wish there were a semi auto version. Also got rid of 4 or 5 regular fox and greys the last two days. Even if they run off instead of doing back flips or just dropping, you know you have hit them from the “phutt” sound the pellet makes as it hits their hide. You can hear it from 150 or more feet.

    The result was that I had undisturbed tomato plants on the deck for three days, with nothing digging into the clay pots and spreading dirt all over.

    This morning they were at it again. Replacements must have been sent in by headquarters. But as I needed to get up here to the farm, I called a truce and forebore.

    Yeah, the Black and English walnut trees, the grapevines, the paw paws and persimmons and apple trees and pear trees are all doing well. For the animals that is. I plant and maintain, and they invade. And no matter how many I remove, more are lined up to take their place. It is as if they have nothing to do with their lives but feed, fight, f##k, and defecate.

    It’s reminiscent of something in the world of politics that escapes me at the moment. Give me some time though and I am sure it will come to me.

  59. It had gone beyond the squish threshold.

    That’s why God gave us boot heels.

    Personally, I never take spiders outside, because the kinds of spiders you find in the house will just turn around and head back to the house. However, as far as I’m concerned, spiders can stay inside the walls and in the attic. I consider myself an agent of Darwinian selection, as I eliminate the “hey let’s go out into the open” gene one spider at a time.

  60. Re: Vinegar and baking soda…

    Which I called rocket fuel for a little plastic rocket I had as a kid.

    When I moved into my house, the first thing that went wrong was the kitchen sink stopped draining. Plunging and drano-ing didn’t work. Rarely does in my experience — the problem is usually further downstream. So I called a plumber and he snaked it out.

    He recommended using an enzyme cleaner once a month, which will put magic enzymes down there to break up the grease. Voila! No more clogs. At least, that’s the theory. We’ll see.

  61. Huxley, the problem may be roots invading your pipes, too, if they are at all old. Used to be you put copper sulfate down there to kill them, but apparently that’s not “Green enough” any more, you can’t get the stuff at Lowes or Home Depot. They don’t seem to have any replacement for it, though, so… probably need to buy some from a chemical supply house and eph them.

  62. }}} Rufus T. Firefly

    OK, and not ok. I was unaware that some males were capable of it, but my assertion is still correct, since if you see a spider web, with a spider in it, it’s almost certainly a female. This is true both inside and outside.

    And there may be species for which the size differential is less, but the biguns are almost always female.

    Banana spiders get pretty huge, in terms of legspan. Bodywise, they can get close to the size of a pinky joint, with a leg span in the 5″x3″ range. Look close, they sometimes are missing limbs, the result of a battle they did not completely lose (since they are alive). Sometimes with a bird or lizard, sometimes with another spider battling for territory.

  65. The Jamaican folk song often referred to as, “The Banana Boat Song,” or, “Day-O” and made famous by Harry Belafonte and/or the Tarriers (featuring Alan Arkin before he took up acting) (Belafonte sued the Tarriers for theft and lost) has a lyric referring to “the deadly, black tarantula” hiding in a bunch of bananas. However, based on the article neo shared, tarantulas are much more likely to be concealed in bunches of grapes and the spider Belafonte and Arkin sang about was a Brazilian Wanderer.

  66. I never hurt spiders if I can possibly help it. I rescue them and put them outside. I admit I don’t let them crawl on me, but I don’t understand the animosity. On the rare occasion when they turn out to be a poisonous Widow or Recluse, I’d be extra careful.

    I’m the same way about snakes. I don’t get it.

  67. I don’t remember who quoted this, but I think it’s apt.

    “Women will never truly be liberated until they can kill their own spiders.”

  68. You gotta choose the right weapon.

    Many decades ago and moving into a new house, out in the country.

    Day one my wife lets out this tremendous scream, she’s jumped up on a table, and yells upstairs to me that there is a mouse running around the kitchen, and that I have to come downstairs immediately–to “get it,” and to rescue her.

    I am about to take a shower and naked and, hurriedly looking around at the junk piled up in the chaos of our move in, I spy a fire extinguisher.

    So I run downstairs naked, and start to chase the mouse around, spraying it in hopes of killing it.

    Unfortunately, the extinguisher I grabbed was of the powder type, so all I succeeded in doing was spraying powder all over our kitchen, which took hours to clean up.

    In all of the hullabaloo, powder, and confusion, the mouse disappeared, and I never did find it.

  69. I’m with Texan99 on this.

    I don’t kill spiders or snakes unless I have to. I do, however, clear out a lot of spider egg sacs in my garage.

    We have a contingent of barn spiders that live in the nooks and crannies of our front porch. They are not very big, a leg spread of maybe about an inch in diameter, but they build some of the most impressive orb webs I have ever seen.

    We had one once that built a web between the porch and my wife’s car parked about twenty feet away. The spider somehow ran an anchor line from one of the upper eaves of the porch all the way to the tip of the car’s radio antenna. Unfortunately, we had to knock that one down so my wife could get into her car.

    Around this time of year, we also see a lot of common garden spiders. Those are the very impressive ones with the yellow and black coloring, and they too weave some impressive orbs. I never bother those except, I sometimes will catch a beetle and toss it in the web for the entertainment of neighborhood children. Most little boys think this is really cool.

  70. Down here in the South its “Palmetto bugs” (seems like a big, nasty cockroach to me, but down here they claim that they really aren’t, just like in Texas they used to call them “June bugs”), snakes (several of them poisonous), and Gators.

    When you walk outside, or walk the dog you’ve always got to check the ground in the immediate area, you never reach around or under plants without looking, and never, never walk near the margins of any body of water (which you can assume has a Gator in it)–at least two people recently did so in our area, and were dragged in and killed by Gators.

  71. All the women I know, go into a near panic mode upon encountering spiders. That is reason enough to kill any spiders I see invading my world. It forestalls compounding hassles.

    Same goes for bats trying to roost in eaves, mice crawling around the foundation, and pests in the “orchard”. These things are called “pests” for a reason; and once they shit in the sugar bowl ( that has never actually happened to me and would represent a huge infestation) it becomes obvious why. [ I have however had to virtually gut a remote hunting cabin and rebuild a 15 foot section of wall and mud sill by hand ( no electricity anywhere near) because of invading vermin. ]

    Not to mention the disease or actual physical harm they are capable of inflicting. This link may be overstated somewhat, but though the actual risk is statistically minimal, the cost benefit ratio between saving one bat out of millions, and contracting rabies, is all cost and no benefit whatsoever. https://uhs.umich.edu/batsandrabies

    There are billions more where they came from, so there is no reason to usher one of the beasties from the house into the wild when it is invading, or trying to invade my house in the first place.

    In fact, I am at a family vacation farm/cottage which because of aging and health issues involving elderly parents, has been unoccupied except for brief visits by deer hunters, for 5 years. Though the hunters did what they could in the way of upkeep during the weeks they were here, it slowly went down hill once it was no longer consistently occupied and maintained as a summer place. Thank goodness for ultrasonic devices , even if they only half work, and then temporarily. The place looked good inside generally, but I still had to burn the contents of several drawers that were from inexpensive bureaus not having sealed bottoms.

    These pests just don’t seem to have a decent respect for private property or interpersonal boundaries. Another facet of that strange political parallel that keeps cropping up.

  76. “Women will never truly be liberated until they can kill their own spiders.” – Roy

    Just don’t be mansplaining about how to do it!

  77. However, Jeff Foxworthy’s bit about the ceiling fan is mansplaining done right: gives you useful information you might need someday.

  78. By the way, I’ve killed plenty of spiders in my time. Little ones. If they pass a certain size and weight limit, I can’t bring myself to do it.

  79. In case anyone is wondering if Jeff just made it all up, this is a guaranteed true story, as told to me by a female Scouter during a break between activities at summer camp.

    She and her husband married late in life (possibly the second time for one or both; I don’t recall), and of course were very much in love, but had some difficulty merging their life-styles. One thing, she said, particularly irritated her. When he undressed at night, he dropped his clothes on the floor instead of putting them in the laundry hamper in the bathroom.
    Despite frequent, loving, reminders, and occasional half-hearted attempts to comply, he continued to fall back into his accustomed habit.
    One day, the wife being a logical person and also a dog owner, she moved the hamper into the bedroom, to the precise spot where her husband usually shed his clothing. Since the basket was right there, the clothes fortuitously landed inside of it.
    She was careful not to make any comments.
    In a couple of days, once that connection was established, she moved the hamper a few feet closer to the bathroom. He walked over the necessary few steps and dropped his clothes inside.
    In a week or so, the hamper was right outside the bathroom door.

    That night, after he undressed — in the original location, as always — he picked up his clothes and was half-way to the hamper when he suddenly stopped, turned to her (visualize Foxworthy’s face on his way back to bed after turning on the fan), and said, “I see what you did there!”

    However, as she suggested sweetly, since he was now in the hamper habit, why not keep it up? – and he did.

  80. Neo – agreed about the size consideration – the ick factor of spurting spidery body fluids is a limiting factor for squishing.

  81. Rufus, yes the spider photo on the bathroom floor prank worked perfectly, and on BOTH daughters because one was on a far side of the house when the first one flicked on the bathroom light and yelled something like “holy sh*t!”, then, “MOM!”, then laughed, and I got her to promise to be quiet and not tell and then we both got to enjoy the other daughter’s similar reaction. Big hairy spiders really are scary.

  82. Amy – reminds me of a prank some friends pulled on their daughter when she returned from college one summer. They filled her room with balloons and then, just as she started laughing and popping them, informed her that some of them were water balloons.

    My family was less inventive – they plugged a tape player (I’m that old) into an outlet connected to the light switch while I was asleep the first night, and loaded a cassette queued to “The Star Spangled Banner.”
    It was a loud awakening in the morning.

  83. If you ever find a Biden/Kamala supporter in your shower, smack it in the head and wash it down the tubes.

    Then the poor deluded creature will not suffer the embarassment that awaits in November 2020.

    The creature can be identified by the white face and trhe BLM tee shirt.

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