Friday, May 30, 2008

Not Again

Some of you might remember reading about my last encounter with a spider. For those of you who missed that post, let's just say that due to my extreme case of arachnophobia, I almost destroyed our bathroom in my attempts to dispose of an Eight-Legged Nasty. Since that time, Hubby has been extra alert to any presence of spiders in the house, and has been systematically eliminating them before I see them to prevent any ensuing disaster. So I haven't had any close encounters since that time, and was just beginning to slip back into a happy mode of blissful ignorance of all things eight-legged...until I got into my car on Wednesday.

It started out like any normal morning. I got into my car, backed out of our driveway, and began the commute to work. Then, suddenly, as I was stopped at a red light, I saw it. At first, I couldn't believe it, and thought I was seeing things. "Maybe it's really on the outside of the car," I thought. "There's no way it could have gotten in here. All the windows were rolled up in the garage last night."

And then it moved. And I realized that it wasn't a hallucination, and that it wasn't outside. No, it was a medium sized, plump Eight-Legged, and it was inside my car, crawling around in the space where the roof of the car meets the front window, which, in my car, is about 6 inches from the driver's head. "HOW DID THIS THING GET IN HERE?" I wondered.

I screamed and went to do the is-it-on-me-is-it-on-me dance, but then realized I. Was. Driving. The light has by this time turned green. There are people behind me. And I cannot have an arachnophobic conniption fit while driving if I wanted to continue to observe safe driving methods, like, um, avoiding crashing into anything. So I mustered all of my composure, managed to make it across the intersection and another 100 feet to the nearest parking lot, pulled in, parked, and then proceeded to get out of the car as fast as possible.

And then I had to figure out what to do.

I obviously couldn't leave it there and allow it to roam free in my car.

I wasn't sure I would be able to get my boot in the space where the spider was hanging out sufficiently enough to kill it. Plus, I didn't want people driving by to witness a crazy lady with one boot on one foot and the other one in her hand madly swinging at something inside her car.

I wasn't in a position to flush the Big Nasty down the toilet.

Which left me with only one other option. It is the least used of all spider-eliminating options, and only used when there is no other viable choice.

I would have to make contact.

I looked in the trunk for proper spider squishing material. There was nothing. I looked in my glovebox for tissues and then remembered there weren't any because I'd used them all up when I had pneumonia, and I haven't replaced them yet. I looked in my purse, and found a travel-sized Kleenex pack with three tissues left in them. I decided two would be sufficient to protect my hand from spider guts, wadded them up, and then carefully aimed the wad at the Big Nasty.

Bam! I went in for my attack, and then examined the tissue to gauge the success of the attack.

There appeared to be brown spider guts on the tissue, but there was no spider skeleton. I looked to see if it was still hanging from the window. It was not. I looked to see if it had fallen anywhere in the car. I couldn't find it.

Which left me with a grim possibility: I had failed to kill the spider on the first attack, and would have to go back in for a second attempt.

I aimed the wad again. This time I wiped it across the area where I had seen the spider, hoping this would result in the spider skeleton appearing on the tissue. But no such luck. I only got one leg. I looked inside the car again, but still did not see any evidence of a spider. "Well, where did it go?" I wondered.

I waited a few minutes, but nothing moved. I decided the odds were pretty good that I had killed it, so I got back in my car, and drove to work without further incident.

I have not seen the spider since. So either I killed it, or I'll see a seven-legged spider crawling around my car in the next few days.

4 comments:

Colleen said...

Way to be brave! I can't handle bugs in my car. I've been known to be the crazy lady swatting around in my car, trying to get a fly or a mosquito out the window. to people looking in, I probably look quite strange! I think a spider in the car would be the ultimate in creepy!

Queen Goob said...

You have arachnophobia and I have katsaridaphobia - the only difference is you are brave. If there were a roach in my car, I would have swerved across four lanes of traffic, threw open my door, and run screaming like a crazy woman begging for someone to come and save me.

Yeah, you're WAY braver than me!

By the way, have you stopped looking for the thing to pop back up on the dash or the windshield? It usually takes three to four days for me even though the heat index for any given vehicle parked in the hot Florida sun is approximately 462ยบ Fahrenheit and no living creature can survive for more than 7 minutes…..tops.

Mrs. R said...

Colleen: Thanks. Yeah, the spider was definitely the worst. At least with the other bugs, you can roll down the window and try to shoo them out. What are you going to do with a spider though?

Queen: Oh. Do. I. Have. A. Roach. Story. For. You. But it will have to wait for another time. :) And no, I haven't stopped looking for it. Unfortunately, it's not hot enough here to bake the thing, so there's still a chance it could be crawling around in there somewhere. I'll probably only feel better after the normal life span of a spider passes.

Miss Awesome said...

ughhhhh.. I hate spiders almost as much as I hate rats.