I am currently sporting two spider bites. One’s on my right ankle and gets little notice, but the other bite is in the bend of my right arm. I think the lady at the post office today thought I might be a heroin user. She certainly asked me a bunch of suspicious sounding questions about the package I was mailing: “Does this parcel contain anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous, including lithium batteries and perfume?”
Okay, so they ask that about every package mailed in the U.S. these days, still I thought she might be looking at me with an odd mix of pity and fear, thinking, “Poor old biddy, hope she doesn’t rob me for drug money.”
And while I have but the two bites, poor Studly Doright has six: five on his stomach and two on his arm. Everywhere he goes he wafts the scent of calamine lotion. It’s not sexy.
We figure we must’ve been bitten while working in the yard on Monday. Neither of us took precautions against spider bites, such as wearing double thick armor and sealing up any chinks in the metal with a combination of duct tape and bailing wire. Indeed, we worked bare armed with loose clothing just begging for a spider to come inside. We tempted fate and fate won.
Now, though, I’m convinced that our home is infested with the little critters. I’ve sprayed every nook and cranny with the scent of peppermint, and I dressed for bed last night in long johns and a hoodie.
Seriously, I had a horrifying experience with a spider when we lived in Kansas. I dreamt that I was eating a salad. The lettuce was crisp and crunchy. When my alarm went off I could still hear the crunching of the lettuce, but it was coming from inside my head. I thought, “oh hell, I’ve lost my mind!”
I began tossing my head and slapping at my ears as I stumbled to the bathroom. Miraculously, the crunching stopped, and I looked down to see a tiny spider on the bathroom floor. I killed him. No hesitation. The whole experience made me wonder if there are people sitting in insane asylums who just need their ears checked for spiders.
Yikes! Hope those bites heal quickly.
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Thanks! I hope so, too!
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Great, apt, cartoon. I, too, hope for your early relief. Thanking providence that our spiders don’t bite
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What a horrible experience, glad the little critter ran out. Making my ears itch.
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I can still remember the horror! I slept with cotton in my ears for a long time!
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That is just what I was thinking. I remember years ago reading about someone who had a red back spider living in her ear, in Readers Digest. Of course she had no idea what was bothering her, but her doctor could actually see it. Fortunately a good outcome and no bite, which could be very nasty from an Australian Red back. Shudders!
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Okay! I’m getting my cotton balls.
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Ermagerd! My most hated of all things unholy. Some lady in our neighborhood group posted online that she’d sucked up her second brown recluse and we are NOT supposed to have those here! 😭😭😭 And for the record, I have had a spider go in my one open ear and I’ll never forget the horrifying crackling!!
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Even as I wrote this post I got the heebie jeebies remembering that experience. I really thought I’d gone crazy.
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I killed a horrendously huge spider in our place the week we moved in. I attributed it to the fact that our front door had no sweep at the bottom, so anything could have crawled in. After that was fixed, I saw two more of “moderate” size about six months later. Luckily my wife never saw any of them (she’s afraid of spiders), but now I continue to look around nearly 24/7 for them. Yuck. – Marty
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We have those ginormous banana spiders here. It’s not the big ones I worry about, though! It’s those teeny, tiny, sneaky ones that scare me!
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