No, Mr. Spider, I expect you to die

I hate spiders. (I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before.) Since I hate them, I am a huge chicken and don't want to kill them…but my husband has basically refused to kill critters for me anymore, so I am on my own. Which would be scary enough in and of itself, but I think the spiders are getting smarter. And that, my friends, is simply terrifying.

Sunday morning, I stumbled out of bed in my usual stupor to let the dogs out. Since I take something to help me sleep, I'm usually pretty confused for the first half-hour or so after I get up. I was collecting the dogs' dishes to feed them, when I saw it. Huge, black, evil freakin' spider, hanging out by the laundry room door. We keep a rolled-up catalog in the kitchen for killing critters (and threatening wayward mutts), so I grabbed it and steeled myself for battle. I gave the big #$%*^!& a solid swat, and stepped back to check his whereabouts. Except there were no whereabouts, because he was gone. No telltale smoosh on the catalog, but no sign of creepy-crawly, either. Then I heard a scratching, scuttling sound. And noticed that the catalog—which was still IN MY HAND—was moving. The spider had apparently seen the catalog coming, decided it would be a lark to cause me to have a fatal heart attack at 6:15 on a Sunday morning, and jumped inside. I was now holding one JC Penney's underwear ad, and one eight-legged ball of evil. I immediately broke out in a cold sweat, felt faint, and nearly wet myself, simultaneously. With more presence of mind than I thought I possessed, I shook the catalog violently until the monster fell out, then proceeded to beat him into oblivion. Have you ever seen Dr. No (the first James Bond movie)? Remember the tarantula scene? It was kinda like that. (For those of you who have never seen Dr. No, Bond wakes up in his hotel room to find a tarantula crawling up his arm. He flings it off, grabs a shoe, and pounds it repeatedly. During the beating, there is a big, crashing chord that plays with each whack. BAM! BAM! BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!!! Then Bond wanders weakly off to the bathroom, clutching his stomach, presumably to hurl.)

This repeated pounding on the floor with the catalog woke up my husband, muttering about the racket. Of course, if the spider had crawled out onto my arm? He would have found me in the middle of the kitchen floor, dead of fright, and surrounded by hungry, confused (but mostly hungry) dogs. And I'm sure the spider that caused it would have been long gone. Even Gil Grissom wouldn't have been able to solve that one.

This might be rarer than Sasquatch...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a rant about some butt-ugly shoes I saw at Off Broadway, which I dubbed "floots" because they're kind of a boot/flip-flop hybrid. Since then, I've seen them in all the shoe stores, but never on an actual person. (Maybe because they are, well, butt-ugly?) But my sharp-eyed blog buddy Cardiogirl had a sighting! She wrote a hilarious post about it, complete with an awesome illustrative doodle. You should go read it immediately, because it was nine kinds of awesome. Thanks, cg...that totally made my day.

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Do you ever have a dimwit week? If so, is there a cure, or am I going to be an idiot forever? All week long, I've been answering my work phone and completely forgetting what to say. On Sunday, I bought a dozen eggs so that I could make a pineapple upside-down cake for work...then left the eggs in the car for six hours. When I was baking the cake earlier this evening, I realized (too late) that I had bought the wrong kind of cake mix...and boogered up the liquid/fat ratio beyond all recognition. If you can offer any suggestions to help my poor brain, I would really appreciate it. I'm off to Kroger to buy more cake ingredients.

Weird things, volume 2: The one with the pig

(So, it seems that my last post freaked some folks out. Sorry! I have a strong stomach and a high tolerance for yucky stuff, so I forget sometimes that other people might not enjoy reading about things like my gross ear. I promise, there will be nothing icky in this post.)

As far back as I can remember, I have loved pigs. I'm not really sure why I love them; I've seen several porcine-related episodes of Dirty Jobs, and they're certainly not the tidiest or most charming critters. Still, I think they're adorable. When it became trendy to keep pot-bellied pigs as pets a few years ago, I wanted one desperately...that is, until I actually met one.

I had been out to a bar with a couple of co-workers one January Saturday night. We ran into some friends-of-friends, a group of college guys, and ended the evening hanging out at their place. I can't really remember what brought the conversation around to their pet, but one of the guys said, "We have a pot-bellied pig." You do? Squee!! Where? No sooner had the words "in the back yard" come out of his mouth than I  was out the door, looking for some sign of a pet pig. Mind you, I completely disregarded the fact that it was after midnight, the guys' house was in a suburb (and therefore surrounded by close neighbors) and it was about ten degrees. Nothing was going to stop me from petting a pig.

I somehow found the pen in the dark, squee-ing all the way (did I mention that I may not have been entirely sober?). The pig had come to the gate, probably to see who was making such a ruckus at that time of night. I was just sticking my hand through the gate to pet him when, simultaneously, I heard, "DON'T!" and felt a CHOMP. The pig, the one that I was so excited to meet, had bitten me! The guy explained that the pig lived outside because he wasn't very friendly, and I wasn't the only person he had chomped. I was crushed. I had no idea pigs could be ill-tempered. The bite didn't hurt much at the time (tipsy, you know) but my fingers were really sore the next morning. That day, I gave up my hopes of having a pet pig. Since then, I don't really trust them, so I just squee over them from afar.

So, there you go. Yet another weird thing that has happened to me. I don't know anyone else who has been bitten by a pig. Have you ever had a close encounter with a barnyard animal?

Weird things seem to happen to me, Volume 1

"There is no earring here," said the triage nurse confidently as she checked out my earlobe. "It must have come out." When I told her that there was, in fact, an earring there, except my earlobe was too swollen to see it--well, she got kind of pale. It's a little alarming when an ER nurse, who has probably seen every kind of gnarly injury known to man, looks at a part of your body and blanches. Let's go back to the beginning of the story, though.

My poor ears have taken a lot of abuse—they have been pierced, in exactly the same spot, no less than five times. The first two times, I was too young to care for them, so I let them grow back; the third time, they got infected; the fourth time, things got interesting. My ears had been pierced, again, for about two weeks. The left one had been feeling a little infect-y, but I really wanted to wear earrings, so I was trying to deal with it. In the span of a couple of hours one evening, my ear turned bright red and started to swell. It was getting kind of painful, so I checked it in the mirror…and realized that I couldn’t see the earring, at all. My ear had actually grown (or swollen or whatever), well, around the earring. I was starting to get kind of freaked out by this point, so I headed off to the ER. Where I made the nurse turn pale. After apologizing to the nurse, I eventually ended up lying on an ER gurney while a doctor took a scalpel to my earlobe and cut(!) it open to retrieve the earring. I don’t want to be too graphic, but I will note that I had to throw away my white sweater after that little escapade. Did you know that there is a lot of blood in your earlobe? I didn't either. The evening ended with the shaken triage nurse telling me that her daughter had been begging for pierced ears for months, but there was no way it was going to happen after she saw my ear. So, to the child who got a hearty lecture instead of a shiny new pair of earrings, I’m really sorry that I wigged out your mom.

Since a lot of weird things seem to happen to me, I think I'm going to make this post part one of a series. (The next gripping tale features a pig.) Are you one of those people, too? If you are, what's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you?

How do I hate thee, Blogger? Let me count the ways...

There was supposed to be a pre-written, mostly well-thought-out post here tonight, but the first of what turned out to be many computer snafus left me unable to retrieve it. Instead, I was going to regale you with off-the-cuff tales about a couple of my early jobs...except that bloody bollocky frickin' Blogger refuses to save any of my drafts. (Props to Absolutely Fabulous for teaching me British slang.) It keeps giving me some error messages about META tags, which means about as much to me as Esperanto or astrophysics. So, I'm conceding to Blogger, for now. Check back tomorrow night for a post about the weird thing that happened to my ear. It's more interesting than it sounds, I promise.