tw arachnophobia
Tuesday, 20 September 2022 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtI am currently locked in an Epic and Death-Defying territorial battle with a large spider (either one of those non-poisonous flat wall jobs or a rain spider, I keep forgetting to take a photo for better ID) who appears to be bound and determined to reside in my small abode, whether I like it or not. I have randomly assigned him male gender for no adequately defined reason, the way he waved his legs at me threateningly seemed a bit boyish (also possibly by way of Cosmic Balance since my late lamented orb weavers in the garden were definitely female, given their small husbands huddling nervously at the edge of the web). He is a fairly respectable size, about 10cm across his spread legs, and he clearly comes into the kitchen from the courtyard, he spent about three days lurking in the corner above the glass door.
So, in purely abstract terms, I have no beef with spiders. They are fascinating, and frequently beautiful, and wierdly and satisfyingly alien in shape, and fill an important ecological niche, and I'm generally quite happy to have them bumbling around my ceilings doing arachnoid cull projects on the local mosquito population while I hold occasional one-sided conversations in which I cordially wish them good hunting. I don't dust away occupied webs, and I certainly don't kill spiders, and I will cheerfully rescue any trapped members of the species from the sink (or the bath, had this house a bath, which it doesn't) and put them outside.
But. Atavistic hind-brain functions being what they are, spiders above a certain size make my skin crawl. I am happy with them being on the ceiling in the kitchen, but if one's in my bedroom I can't sleep. It's not even a conscious fear of a poisonous bite, although I would imagine that's the purpose behind the evolutionary aversion - it's rather that the mere idea of all those legs skittering over my flesh is deeply disturbing.
So this member of the tribe has been unusually persistent, and the other night started migrating away from the door towards the bedroom in a way that was simply Not On. I tried my usual infallible technique, which is to poke at him gently with the end of the broom and herd him out of the door into the night, but he took grave exception to that, and simply bunched in his corner and waved his legs. When I persisted, he leaped madly away, startling me into a slightly unladylike screech, and went to ground in the curtains on the glass door. Since I couldn't think of any way to remove him, I muttered imprecations and went to bed, slightly goose-bumped and resolutely leaving the curtains unclosed.
I didn't see him for two days, and thought, hooray, the broom-pokage clearly offended him enough that he left in a Marked Manner. Except. Last night, there he was, on the wall above my bed, approximately at head height, thereby executing a flanking offensive aimed straight at my weak spots with commendable tactical acumen. To make things worse, his presence became apparent (a) at the precise moment when, having read peaceably in bed for an hour, I was about to close down the Ipad to sleep, and (b) under the effects of our current national affliction of load shedding, now at stage six, what the actual fuck, and depriving us of power for anything up to six hours a day. So. Spider, Right There Above My Bed, In the Pitch Dark, it was sheer luck that I moved the torch around to catch him on the wall before switching it off.
There was absolutely no way I was sleeping with him there. The likelihood of him actually leaving the wall to climb onto my bed, mosquito net or person was extremely slim, but tell that to my skin, which at that point was making a spirited attempt to crawl completely off my body and nest on top of my head. (In a perfectly nasty confluence of events, I'd spent the afternoon having the jolly bi-annual mammogram, so was not, shall we say, entirely at peace with my own body anyway, given several hours spent half naked while strangers alternately squidged and prodded my hapless boobs and made comments about them being "busy" and "active". My skin was already sending me rude telegrams even before the spider transpired).
There was nothing for it but the Cup Trick, as learned at my mother's knee. So what ensued was basically a Complicated Juggling Act, initially for Spider, Plastic Cup, Torch and Cardboard Sheet, in which I stuck the clear plastic lentil jar, emptied of lentils, over him and slid a sheet of card under him to trap him. Gibbering slightly, I might add (I'd say me not him, but he was probably feeling something similar), but with, I thought, commendably steady hands. Act 2 was more complicated, because at this point, holding a plastic container at arm's length with a death-grip on the cardboard sheet to make sure he couldn't escape (he was exploring his clear plastic prison with a certain suggestion of what-the-hell and considerably more animation than the Sandman in a similar situation) and the torch clamped under my arm, I arrived at the back door to realise I had foolishly neglected to open it first. This left me with the additional elements of Curtains, Key, Security Gate and Door to juggle with absolutely no hands owing to death-grip and torch.
So, it transpires that modern technology clearly trumps the Atavistic Skin-Crawling, because apparently I have absolutely no problem with jamming a large spider in a plastic cup against my midriff while holding his cardboard lid on in the aforementioned death-grip, using the other hand to navigate the door-opening, and with the torch propped on the egg basket to illumine the torrid scene. It appears that a solid layer of plastic nicely neutralises the usual need to leap six feet backwards from Large Spiders and obsessively check every inch of my clothing in case they've climbed on me while I wasn't looking.
Thereafter it was anticlimactic: I shook him down gently into the bottom of the container, removed the cardboard with the self-congratulatory flourish of a magician pulling the tablecloth out from under a full formal dinner service, and flung him gently, but with authority, into the hedge. Then I went to bed and slept like a baby, with a strangely smug sense of competence and Triumph Against The Odds. With any luck this whole proceeding will outrage him enough that he won't try to return.
I do like spiders, really. In the abstract. Not in the flesh. Not my flesh, anyway.
So, in purely abstract terms, I have no beef with spiders. They are fascinating, and frequently beautiful, and wierdly and satisfyingly alien in shape, and fill an important ecological niche, and I'm generally quite happy to have them bumbling around my ceilings doing arachnoid cull projects on the local mosquito population while I hold occasional one-sided conversations in which I cordially wish them good hunting. I don't dust away occupied webs, and I certainly don't kill spiders, and I will cheerfully rescue any trapped members of the species from the sink (or the bath, had this house a bath, which it doesn't) and put them outside.
But. Atavistic hind-brain functions being what they are, spiders above a certain size make my skin crawl. I am happy with them being on the ceiling in the kitchen, but if one's in my bedroom I can't sleep. It's not even a conscious fear of a poisonous bite, although I would imagine that's the purpose behind the evolutionary aversion - it's rather that the mere idea of all those legs skittering over my flesh is deeply disturbing.
So this member of the tribe has been unusually persistent, and the other night started migrating away from the door towards the bedroom in a way that was simply Not On. I tried my usual infallible technique, which is to poke at him gently with the end of the broom and herd him out of the door into the night, but he took grave exception to that, and simply bunched in his corner and waved his legs. When I persisted, he leaped madly away, startling me into a slightly unladylike screech, and went to ground in the curtains on the glass door. Since I couldn't think of any way to remove him, I muttered imprecations and went to bed, slightly goose-bumped and resolutely leaving the curtains unclosed.
I didn't see him for two days, and thought, hooray, the broom-pokage clearly offended him enough that he left in a Marked Manner. Except. Last night, there he was, on the wall above my bed, approximately at head height, thereby executing a flanking offensive aimed straight at my weak spots with commendable tactical acumen. To make things worse, his presence became apparent (a) at the precise moment when, having read peaceably in bed for an hour, I was about to close down the Ipad to sleep, and (b) under the effects of our current national affliction of load shedding, now at stage six, what the actual fuck, and depriving us of power for anything up to six hours a day. So. Spider, Right There Above My Bed, In the Pitch Dark, it was sheer luck that I moved the torch around to catch him on the wall before switching it off.
There was absolutely no way I was sleeping with him there. The likelihood of him actually leaving the wall to climb onto my bed, mosquito net or person was extremely slim, but tell that to my skin, which at that point was making a spirited attempt to crawl completely off my body and nest on top of my head. (In a perfectly nasty confluence of events, I'd spent the afternoon having the jolly bi-annual mammogram, so was not, shall we say, entirely at peace with my own body anyway, given several hours spent half naked while strangers alternately squidged and prodded my hapless boobs and made comments about them being "busy" and "active". My skin was already sending me rude telegrams even before the spider transpired).
There was nothing for it but the Cup Trick, as learned at my mother's knee. So what ensued was basically a Complicated Juggling Act, initially for Spider, Plastic Cup, Torch and Cardboard Sheet, in which I stuck the clear plastic lentil jar, emptied of lentils, over him and slid a sheet of card under him to trap him. Gibbering slightly, I might add (I'd say me not him, but he was probably feeling something similar), but with, I thought, commendably steady hands. Act 2 was more complicated, because at this point, holding a plastic container at arm's length with a death-grip on the cardboard sheet to make sure he couldn't escape (he was exploring his clear plastic prison with a certain suggestion of what-the-hell and considerably more animation than the Sandman in a similar situation) and the torch clamped under my arm, I arrived at the back door to realise I had foolishly neglected to open it first. This left me with the additional elements of Curtains, Key, Security Gate and Door to juggle with absolutely no hands owing to death-grip and torch.
So, it transpires that modern technology clearly trumps the Atavistic Skin-Crawling, because apparently I have absolutely no problem with jamming a large spider in a plastic cup against my midriff while holding his cardboard lid on in the aforementioned death-grip, using the other hand to navigate the door-opening, and with the torch propped on the egg basket to illumine the torrid scene. It appears that a solid layer of plastic nicely neutralises the usual need to leap six feet backwards from Large Spiders and obsessively check every inch of my clothing in case they've climbed on me while I wasn't looking.
Thereafter it was anticlimactic: I shook him down gently into the bottom of the container, removed the cardboard with the self-congratulatory flourish of a magician pulling the tablecloth out from under a full formal dinner service, and flung him gently, but with authority, into the hedge. Then I went to bed and slept like a baby, with a strangely smug sense of competence and Triumph Against The Odds. With any luck this whole proceeding will outrage him enough that he won't try to return.
I do like spiders, really. In the abstract. Not in the flesh. Not my flesh, anyway.
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 28 September 2022 03:10 pm (UTC)Must have been quite a chonky lentil jar.
- astrolabe_cat
no subject
Date: Thursday, 6 October 2022 08:50 am (UTC)It's not an unusually chonky lentil jar, spider legs do fold up a bit...