Arr! Ack! No! Part 2: The Return...

Why is Johnny never here when these things happen?

And oh holy shit, by the way, are those eyeballs on the top there? Or grabby jaws? Or little fists? Whatever they are, I didn't notice them until I saw this picture. Which is a good thing. Because otherwise I would never have found the gumption to do this:

Well, what? You didn't think I was going to touch the thing directly, did you? No freakin' way! Not even directly with a wad of toilet paper, and especially not wedged into that crack the way it was. What if it jumped, for god's sake? I could have broken my neck! (You know, with the twitching and the screaming and the slipping and the falling?). In fact, I did briefly consider leaving it like this:

But then I remembered that that's the shower there, and it gets wet, and if there's one thing I remember from my years at summer camp, it's that wadded-up balls of wetted toilet paper stick like glue. Forever. So I screwed up all my courage and did this:

Ha! Ya bastard! Now who'll have the nerve to tell me I need to clean the crack around my shower? Seriously, if anyone out there could tell me how to clean that crack, I'd love to do it. In the meantime, you should all just count your blessings that I managed to crop the following pictures carefully enough so as to hide the ring of crud I somehow failed to notice accumulating around the edges of my toilet bowl:

Ha ha, I say again! Look at him, bleeding all over the place. Hm, though, do you think I might have used a bit more toilet paper?

Ha ha ha! Uh oh...

How did that happen? Oh no!

That's it. From here on out I'm peeing with my pants on. At least until the snow falls, anyway.

And even that I'm only doing when Johnny is freakin' home.


Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to twitch, scream and fall down...

Arr! Ack! No!

Johnny and I go away for one little weekend in the woods, and look what we come home to:

AUGH!!

(In case you didn't notice it yourself, may I point out the light switch on the right there? Just, you know, for size comparison?)

I'd like you to know I killed that bastard with my own two hands. And I'd like you to be proud of me. Because it actually took two hands to do it, plus a kitchen towel. And I'm not apologizing for the kitchen towel, either. I couldn't very well run the risk of him punching through the wad of toilet paper that was my only other option, could I?

Or, well, I suppose that wasn't my only other option. I suppose I could have smacked his ass flat with a boot. But then I would've risked taking away the single useful function left in that sliding glass door -- namely: keeping the raindrops on the outside -- and with it any last shred of remaining dignity left to the AssVac as a whole. Not to mention the creature-from-hell guts he'd surely have left all over my nice white drapery.

Anyway, it appears the annual invasion has begun. In fact, come to think of it, that not-so-little fucker looks familiar. Hm. Correct me if I'm wrong, but did I not declare that particular mission accomplished once already? Do you think maybe this one was hiding in a cave or something? Or do you think maybe my initial success just made the fringe bugs angry and now I'm dealing with a whole new second (or fourth) wave of insurgency?

Ah, well. Who cares? Either way, my friends, it's freakin' on.

You Think I'm Kidding

This guy?

...actually already dead before I saw him on the floor and freaked out and stepped on him. Twice. Didn't do a g-d thing. Didn't even squish his dried-up corpse

Except, well, I had a a q-tip in my ear when I did it, and now I think I'm deaf.

Look at him, he has a shadow, for god's sake.

Help me! Please, help me!

FRIG!

I'm sitting here, feeling all proud of myself because I've finished this huge project that I've been working on. And feeling a little sad, listening to Pavarotti who just died...

And I'm listening to this, which isn't exactly Pavarotti, even though it is. But my dad sent it, because it's Bono, and Johnny's Irish, and so it counts...

And the FUCKING spider from this morning's bathroom showed up on my desk!

Now, okay, maybe it's not the same spider, but it sure looked like him. Sat there on top of my toilet roll and shook its fist at me...

I pounded the toilet roll, but it disappeared. Gone. I looked under and behind the desk -- the bastard ain't anywhere.

I think I have to move. That's it. Who wants a house?

Destroyed By Madness

I know I said I'd write this poem this morning, but it's going to have to wait. Before I go to bed tonight, I promise. I've been shanghaied by life, in its myriad impish ways...

First of all, I'm not even going to get into the nightmare we've been through with the Kid this week. I'll tell the whole story when it's over, but for now suffice to say that yesterday his Father called here to yell at him and tell him he would kick his ass if he didn't get it done by Friday. He swears he will; I'll believe it when I see it. But in the meantime I have to go to city hall first thing this morning and get an electrical permit -- which, silly me, I sort of assumed the guy I hired to do the job would have taken care of. [Except I just called and I can't. I need a licensed electrician to do it. Balls.]

Second of all, in the middle of all this Kid stuff, we plumb forgot about #1. Johnny doctor's appointment on Tuesday night, and #2. Johnny's appointment with Immigration Wednesday morning. That last one's worse, but hopefully not quite as bad as it sounds. I did send the thing in asking for a new appointment, but we haven't received any confirmation. I spent a half an hour on the phone this morning, only to be told that they can't tell me anything. We just have to sit and wait for him to either get a new appointment notice in the mail, or get deported. Ah well. On the bright side -- think of all the cash we'll save on plane fare!

(And can I just say: This is not a bitch about the immigrants -- I'm married to an immigrant, for crying out loud -- but there is no love lost between me and the USCIS. If you call the number on your English-printed form and wait on hold for twenty minutes without ever pushing a single button, and every recording that you hear while you're on hold is in both English and Spanish... is it unreasonable to assume you'll have the option of speaking English when a live person finally comes on the line? The first time I called, a Spanish-speaking operator came on and I asked for English, he disconnected me! I had to call back and wait on hold again. I got a Spanish-speaking lady this time. I asked her for English and she scolded me for "coming through on her Spanish line.")

Third -- and, in my mind, worst of all -- look at the freaking spider that was in my bathroom this morning!

Yes it is worst of all. If Johnny gets deported I can move to Ireland, live in a house we own free and clear without a mortgage, get socialized health care and not pay any taxes on my writing income. This fucker might actually touch me! (Also, okay, maybe I could clean the outside corner of the shower better, but that's not the point...)

The point is: I sat down on the toilet and saw that bastard and jumped back up and ran for Johnny. "Come kill this thing," I said, "no fucking around. No taking it outside. You kill it, do you hear me? Kill. It."

He limped in (I keep forgetting that he's broken), took a look, and said "Oh, jesus, even I'm afraid of that one." And he went for the flyswatter that my mother gave me for just this very purpose.

Yes, that is my office chair it's leaning on. Ain't Mom grand?

He couldn't swat it with the swatter because it was in the corner like that. His plan was to knock it to the ground and step on it. But when he knocked it to the ground it backed into the corner and put up its dukes. All six of 'em. So Johnny turned the swatter around and poked it to death with the handle. My hero.

He grabbed a wad of toilet paper to pick up and flush the nasty corpse, but he'd poked it so completely into the crack between the baseboard and shower, that all he got on the TP wad was dukes. All six of 'em.

"Are you sure he's really dead, though?" I asked him. "Are you sure he didn't just tuck into the crack to save himself?"

"I'm sure," says Johnny.

"And if not, he's gonna have one hell of a limp."

All I'm Saying Is...

This...


... is the spot from the spider I squished on the kitchen wall this morning. And that, for size-comparison, is my thumb. It was black and muscly and moved all twitchy-like.

They're getting worse...

Die! Die! Die!

Signifying Nothing

This first part is not my fault:

Remember my knife? And how I said the other day that it was broken and I found it in my drawer? Well I fixed it. But it broke again. And the pieces of it were in my bag when I cleaned it out yesterday.

When I was going to bed last night – when the game was tied at 24 and I was bored and frustrated – I walked past the knife parts on the kitchen counter and thought “I better put those back in the bedside table drawer for safekeeping.”

Except, when I was walking through the bedroom door, I dropped the knife.

And the knife, thinking it would have a bit of fun, slid four feet across the knotty pine and – sft – down into the little hole where the radiator pipe comes through the floor.

I tried to get it out, but I could only get my four fingers through the hole – old Thumby had to stay outside, preventing Fingers from getting far enough to do anything but push Knife off the shelf of insulation it was resting on and down permanently out of Fingers' reach.

It could have been worse. This could have been a real house, with real floors, where there’s wood and stuff on both sides of the insulation. But we, the AssVac, Big Old Bertha? We have a crawl space. Not under the whole house, but under the addition that is the master bedroom. You go down cellar and walk up into the crawl space through the stairs that used to be the bulkhead before they built the bedroom over the only outside access to the basement.

Well, at that point last night I gave up and went to bed, and this morning I’d forgotten all about it. Until, as I was typing, I looked at the back of my hand and thought “How the hell did I get all those scratche— oh.”

So just now in my pyjamas I went down there. Johnny told me I'd have to cut through the insulation to get at it, and that would fuck everything up. He said that maybe it was a sign: the knife broke last week and had now taken its ownself down through the rabbit hole. Maybe it was just time for me to not have it anymore. My knife had found me on its own, maybe now it was doing its damndest to try and lose me.

Yeah, yeah. Do you think I could just put my hand up under the insulation from the edge?

Because, see, I might have made it sound a little simpler to get into the crawlspace than it really is. Those bulkhead stairs aren’t exactly accessible themselves, because whoever built the bedroom over them also decided there was no reason to properly dispose of an old oil tank when there was a perfectly good but useless bulkhead staircase waiting to be filled. So to get into the crawlspace you have to lean a ladder up against the rusty old oil tank and clamber over. And I really didn’t want to.

But I knew that if I didn’t do it now I would, over time, decide I really didn’t need the knife that badly. And I really did.

(I know that Johnny would have gone in for me, but by this time he’d gone fishing. And I don't mean that metaphorically. And I’m pretty sure he won't be home till ten o’clock tonight.)

There is one other option, though, which is actually how Johnny usually does it – or, I should say, used to do it, when we were still putting in the laundry room and stuff back there. It’s not like he sometimes likes to go into the filthy crawlspace and roll around there just for fun.

The cinder block wall has a hole in it that the other plumbers jackhammered out when they were running the pipes to the laundry room and stuff. It’s about four blocks wide (cinder blocks, not city blocks) with a big old PVC pipe running through it, but you can squish around the pipe and work your body through. Or Johnny can, at least. I’ve never tried.

But it just so happens that this plumber – the Kid – when he was taking down the old pipe yesterday, chose this particular cranny, out of the whole entire cellar, to store the bits and pieces in. Big bits, giant pieces, and this shit ain't PVC. It's too heavy for me to lift. Well, too heavy for me to lift from just the six-inch end that was protruding, when I was in my PJs and before I had my coffee, anyway.

But it was while I was on the ladder with my head in that hole, flicking the flashlight around and pretending to be deciding what to do, that I saw it. My knife! Lying in the dust right by the wall! I didn’t have to cut through insulation, or guess where it might be, or make any stinking decisions whatsoever! It was lying right there waiting for me, and it looked so sad to have been left there overnight…

Because I couldn’t lean the ladder up against the working pipe, or against the protruding pieces of superseded pipe, I had to put the ladder against the wall and reach my arm around behind. Which meant I had to grope blindly through cobwebs and black widow poo, and scrabble around in the dust and the grime on the bottom of the infernal crawlspace.

My arm wasn't long enough. I couldn’t reach the knife. And now I have cinder scratches on my armpit to match the knot-pine scratches on my hand.

I had to shift some stuff out of the way in order to move the ladder so I could try reaching from another angle, and as I grabbed hold of a broom I thought “Hey, I wonder if I could reach the knife with something other than my arm?!”

Idiot.

So I pulled it with the broom, and along with it a big pile of dirt and dust and spider poo which I had to scrabble my fingers through to fish it out. But I did get it. My knife. Phew. It’s still broken, but it’s back. Even if it doesn't want me anymore. I'll kill it before I'll let it leave me for someone else.

Now, I still say I can’t be blamed for any of the above. I accidentally dropped the knife, it made its own pathetic dash for freedom, and I’m pretty proud of myself that I managed to get it back. But here’s the fucking retard part:

I took all sorts of pictures to illustrate this story. The doorway where I dropped it. The expanse of floor it shot across. The hole that it went down. I even brought the camera to the basement and took a picture of my knife in the dust, illuminated by the beam of my Black & Decker flashlight. But, after I took that last picture, I put the camera down on the cement shelf created by that hole the pipe goes through…

And dropped it through the cinder-blocky hole.

I tried to reach it. I put my arm down through at least two and maybe three cinder blocks worth of dank, dark hole, but then I got a little skittish. I’ll try later, when I’m dressed, with a long stick and maybe a really, really giant wad of gum.

But for now, just now – just now – I’m having coffee.

It kind of tastes a bit like spider poo.


Let's have an "Explain the Title CONTEST," shall we? I'll write a sonnet for whoever gets it first...

Ah!

Don't read this!

The bastard who lives here...

... thinks it's a freakin' riot.

Sympathy For The Devil

Last week, I got in Chuck (TFT) to discover a spider had spun a perfect web from the dash to the shotgun seat, and I actually opted to leave the windows closed so as not to ruin her hard work.

Last night, there was an eight-legged bump in the middle of another silken spiral, this time between the clothesline and the giant rhododendron. I turned on the back porch light to highlight it for Johnny.

“The brown ones are poisonous,” he said.

I said “Really?” and shut the light off.

And just this second I passed a yellow one dangling from my bedroom ceiling. I just blew it aside as I walked by.

What’s happening to me?

Actually, I think I learned about this when I was studying ethology. I think it’s called habituation. You know, like at the zoo: you bang on the glass enough times eventually the snakes stop startling? I must note, however, that the article I just linked to, points out that habituation is the “simplest form of learning.”

So.

I can’t learn not to buy the wrong thing all the time. I can’t learn not to put things where they’ll ruin other things. Can’t learn not to trust people I shouldn’t. Hell, I can’t even learn to shut windows against the rain. Or sprinkler. But I can learn not to be afraid of spiders.

Whoopee. At least I’m smarter than a grub. If, that is, grubs are incapable of non-associative learning – a fact I don’t seem to remember anymore.

Ah well, maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome.

Updates From The Homefront

I've got some folks coming over for corned beef and cabbage tomorrow (dig the green background) so I don't have time to write a whole big rant on this week's New Yorker or the latest Times snobbishness - or even my own stupidity. So here are some random updates on some random things I've mentioned before, starting with my own stupidity...

The radio broke again yesterday - the radio that broke before but wasn't really broken? The same exact thing happened: it wouldn't turn up. Turns out I had it on mute. Turns out when it's on mute you can still hear it a little bit. Is it just me? Is nothing I'm complaining about really broken? Am I just a big fat idiotic moron? No, the toilet in the new bathroom won't stop running, and I'm pretty sure I don't have it on mute - and yes, I did jiggle the handle...

The radio announced the other day that the reason people let banks foreclose on their houses is not so much that they can't afford to pay their mortgages, though that's part of it, but also that when property values drop down so far that if they sold they'd still end up owing money, they figure it makes just as much sense to walk away. Hmmm... Well, we'll see what the market's doing in seven years when my fixed rate runs out.

Still no word from Keyspan, though a very nice stranger did write in to suggest that I consider some electrical something or other. I don't know. That would probably entail more electrical work (i.e., rewiring the entire house) than I'm prepared to do right now. Plus there's the whole mysterious-socket-in-the-living-room thing, which I'll have to explain some other time...

I took the plastic off the windows this week when it was 70 degrees outside - a stupid decision, as it turned out, because it's snowing now - but behind the plastic in the picture window in the living room I discovered a dried-up little spider that had apparently been trapped last fall when I put it on. Ha ha, fucker!

Oh, and a new way your house can kill you: you spend an hour and a half making the new stove level and even with the counter top, and then the new stove breaks and you call the Maytag guy and he comes and pulls it out to fix it, but when he shoves it back he doesn't bother levelling it off, and you don't notice, and when you slide the big pot of spaghetti off the range it hits the counter and splashes all over you and you get burns over whatever percentage of your body it is that you can't possibly survive.

I think that's it for now. Happy commencing on St. Patrick's Day!

Eight-Legged Freaks

Have you seen this week’s New Yorker? Or maybe it was last week’s? The one with the mummies on the cover? Oh my god… There’s an article in it about this spider lady, and—

(shudder)

I don’t like spiders. I’m better about them than I used to be: I don’t have to run screaming naked from the house anymore if I see one in the shower. The porch is far enough for me to go now. But then again, I’ve never had a porch before, so maybe I’m not so much better after all.

Anyway this lady – who is apparently like four feet tall and weighs about a pound and a half – divides her time between crawling around dank basements known to harbor poisonous spiders, and “milking” the ones she catches (and brings home in her pockets) for their venom.

Now, I don’t love spiders, but somehow I never thought before about them having “venom.” I mean, I know they bite (some people don’t believe it, but they do – you should see the welts on Johnny’s legs), and some I know can kill you with their bite, but what spiders have in their horrid little mouths is poison – special spider poison – not venom. Snakes have venom. I don’t mind snakes.

This lady goes on to say all kinds of things about spiders I didn’t know before, some that doesn’t even bother me. Did you know, for example, that there’s a kind in South America that lives in colonies by the thousands and cooperates in tasks like web-building and whatevering-it-is–they’re-doing-to-their-prey? That’s kind of cool. I mean, I wouldn’t want to accidentally step on one or anything, but still, it’s kind of cool.

Some of it, though, is – to say the least – disturbing.

This spider bites you and the area around the bite turns black and sloughs off gradually until you’re left with a gaping hole. This one hides in wait and then drops down on your head (okay, they’re trying to drop down on other spiders’ heads, but still). This other one kills its rival and adopts the rival’s children…

Yikes. Who knew spiders took care of spider children? I thought they just laid eggs in your ears or something and then carried on their merry way. Now I have to worry about murderous foster mothers trying to get back in your ears to bring the bastards food and shit?

But no, I don’t. Have to worry about that, I mean. Those kinds of spiders don’t live here.

See, there are more spiders – and more kinds of spiders – in this house I accidentally bought than I have ever seen in my entire life. And I'm not fond of spiders. I've seen thick, leggy yellow ones; tea-green, iridescent ones; brown ones that make funnel-shaped webs and swear at you when you look at them; black ones that look like muscley asterisks and jump on you when you try to squish them... Ever since we moved here I've lived in full-time spider red-alert — but at least I knew there weren’t any kill-you kinds that live in Massachusetts.

Except for spider-lady says there are. Spider Lady says that – what with shipments coming from the Orient and South America – there are venomous arachnids in every state plus Canada. Canada!

Yeesh.

I knew I hated spiders.