It's Scary Here

DS went to Pittsburgh Sunday morning for APS, which is, from what I can gather, a big conference for super nerds. Maybe even bow tie wearing nerds... I don't know. I've never been. All I know for sure is that there's like 10k people there, and the talks are only 15 minutes each. I don't even know how you could say anything useful about science in 15 minutes that you'd fly across the country to say. But he did, and he's gone. He'll be home tomorrow night.

But I digress. The point is, it's scary here. And not because he's gone. He left me in Madison all the time and I survived just fine. SB though... I don't know man. This place is like spider heaven. Also known as SG hell.

As an example, today along I killed 8 spiders. I'm not kidding you. 7 of them were in the two windows in our living room. 1 was in the shower. The most disturbing thing was that one was in the shower.

You see, the spiders appeared about 2 or 3 weeks ago. I had been living here, fearing tarantulas (because apparently those are in the hills), but feeling pretty okay about my actual apartment, for like what? 2 months? The BAM! The first week I found 3 in 2 days. This was kind of the worst week, because I wasn't ready for it. That, and one of them was found as it dropped out of the pajama pants I was putting on. Yeah, that's right. I put on my pajamas, and a spider dropped out of the leg. I screamed. DS was asleep. He cursed me as he stumbled into the bathroom, where I was perched on the toilet seat, and he even called me Jaime (his sister) in his stupor.

The day I found two on the screen door right after bumping into it with my back to open it (cause I was doing laundry, so my hands were full), I decided that was enough. I went to Home Depot and got some of that whole house spray that is supposed to keep bugs out for a whole year. The heavy duty toxic stuff. Since it is toxic, I started with the half of the house I could close off from the cats fairly easily. This included the bathroom. I soaked all the windows, and everything around the windows. Even the screens. I also followed the directions and covered all floor edges out to a few inches. Until today, I had not seen a single spider in that half of the house (though I did find 6 while using the spray).

Now there's one in the bathroom??!!?? A whole year my ass. It hasn't even been 2 weeks!

Also, this morning as I was walking to my car, a spider was running in my direction from across the garage. All I saw was black and a hint of red before I jumped in the car and slammed the door and prayed he wasn't tagging along. I'm trying really, really hard not to think about the fact that I was nearly run down by a black widow.... I might spray the garage tomorrow for good measure.

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*For those of you that know me, you know I have pretty bad arachnophobia. Like, bad. Like, I have nightmares about spiders and kick DS so hard while sleeping that he wakes up and finds me crying in my sleep. I know it's irrational, and I can't help it. One time I tried to think about ways I could get over my fear, and I got so afraid that doing so would make me feel okay about coming in contact with spiders that I couldn't sleep for a few days. One nice thing about being here is that Sam is on the same page as me on this topic. We both know that a spider will attack you if it sees you. And that if you don't kill it and immediately get it out of the house, it could come back to life and come after you when you least expect it. Seriously.

So, with that in mind, notice that I said I killed 8 spiders today. I did that! And yeah, DS might laugh as I get out my little can of Raid and jump backwards in fear at each spray because if I'm not careful, the spider will use the spray to crawl to me, I'm at least doing the killing now. There are parts of the apartment I can't go back to at the moment, because I'm afraid of spider carcasses as well (see above for resurrected spider revenge)... I'm not able to actually get rid of them. Just spray them from a distance and watch in utter fear with goosebumps all over my body to make sure they stop moving. Then run.

Baby steps people.