What Now

ARACHNID PARK

I can't even begin to explain the extent of the skin-crawlingness that I have been experiencing since last night.

As I've already told you, my sister and I have been getting ready to have a yard sale at my mother's old house. Part of the process has been to gather the things that my mom left in the house when she moved, price them, and gather it all together. There were a lot of clothes and chotchkies, mainly, and we've had to go through them all. The first day that Angie had gone over there to get started gathering things, she told me that she was changing clothes in my old bedroom when she picked up a t-shirt that had been in a storage box and a huge brown recluse spider ran out from under it. She said the back of it was as big as a grape! She was understandably freaked out about that, so much so that my mom had to kill it for her. Since then she's been much more careful. Of course, Tuesday night we found another really big brown recluse in a vase in the kitchen (the first one I'd ever seen in person) and that one had been giving me nightmares since I went back home that night! I don't like spiders at all, but I am more freaked out about brown recluses than most other breeds because they are not only seriously venomous, unlike most spiders they are also territorial, and they will come after you. If I had known what we would come across last night, I might have set the house on fire and just called it even. :{

Before I went over there, I stopped at Wal-Mart and bought some gloves and a can of Raid, just in case. We had started hanging up and pricing the clothes in the master bedroom last night, so we had things scattered hither and yon while we went through them. Most of the things were pulled out of the closet, so we weren't worried about them. While I was busy with mom's clothes, Angie picked up a jacket that had belonged to my mom's husband, Grant, and I heard her say "OH!" and the jacket dropped to the floor. She said "A big one of those frickers!" and she ran to get the Raid. I had been sitting on the floor, so of course, I jumped up and ran to the other side of the room! When she came back, she went over to the jacket and couldn't find the thing! We gently picked up one of the sleeves, and I kid you not, a spider the size of a half dollar skittered under a fold. At this point I was about to jump on her back and demand she carry me out of the house, but she reached over and flipped the jacket over again - and a nest of baby brown recluse spiders were crawling all over the coat!!!!! She sprayed the nest, the babies and finally sprayed the momma spider, but those hastareds are resilient! At least we slowed it down enough for me to gather what cajones I could muster and stomp the jacket. My skin tried to crawl off of my bones and run to the car, but I held on to it! I ran to get the gloves and made Angie put on a pair, too, and she ended up having to throw a whole pile of clothes completely away because of the nest in that jacket. If that wasn't enough, within two minutes of that, I reached over and picked up a bathrobe that had been sitting on the floor next to me, and ANOTHER one fell out of it! Angie did her Crocodile Hunter bit on it with the Raid, and we managed to finish cleaning out the room, but not without being seriously careful. I felt like a CSI agent looking for clues. We threw away anything that even looked like a spider was on it.

As we took the things out of the master bedroom and into the living room, Angie noticed another one that looked dead, curled up underneath a window. She didn't want to take any chances, so she sprayed it as well, and it came after her. I heard her screaming from the other side of the house! She did managed to kill it, though, and we decided then and there that we would bug bomb the place within and inch of it's life that night. We didn't see anymore for the rest of the night, but the whole rest of the time I was there, I kept imagining the baby ones crawling up my legs. *shudder* I still feel them.

I honestly believe we nipped a full blown infestation in the bud by killing the nest, but I have no idea how so many of them could have gotten into the house! My mom has always been a supreme housekeeper, so I know that there were no spiders there when she lived there, and they only moved out in May! It's like they were waiting on her to leave or something! Urg. Anyways, before we left last night, we set off a bug bomb and hopefully we have successfully neutralized the enemy invaders. Now Steve, of course, is completely wigging. He is honestly arachnophobic, and the main reason I set the bomb off was because I knew he wouldn't come to the house and help us if he thought that there was even a chance one of them could get on him. I'm not even making fun when I say that, he's not being a girl about spiders, he literally goes into vapor lock around them. Any other bug is no big deal, but spiders he can not handle. I think the only way I convinced him to come with me and help out was to tell him that the house is mostly empty rooms now, and he bug bomb combined with no hiding spots for the spiders, means little chance that one will come at him unawares. Of course, now he's probably afraid one will come flying out of a closet and attach itself to him Alien-Facehugger-Style, but I seriously doubt that's how even the worst spiders behave. *gulp* Right?