Thought Distillery

As a child, I was rather terrified of just about anything with 8 legs. I can remember many a harrowing standoff between my petrified self and Mr. Arachnid starring at me from my bedroom ceiling with his beady little eyes. How glad I am that I’ve mostly turned all my spider panic into more managable spider squirm.

One thing that has always amazed me is how these creatures sneak up on you. Never do you see the little scratchers enter your home or crawl up the wall. They somehow just appear out of the middle of nowhere on your ceiling and usually almost directly above your head. Much like traffic cops, you never see them until its too late.

Over the past week, Corvallis has seen something of a heat wave with stifling hot and sticky nights. Evidentally this is perfect for our favorite 8 legged friends, as I’ve noticed a significant increase in activity. Stepping out the past few mornings has meant opening the door to be greeted by a smiling lady spider dangling in the middle of a marvelous web stretched completely across my door. It has meant clearing a path to the street with a broom such that I don’t catch any webs in the face as I depart for work. It has meant catching in a bucket 1 or 2 visitors on my ceiling per evening and releasing them out the door. For the most part I’ve enjoyed the events and the opportunity to rant about them a bit. I’ve even taken pleasure in watching the huge web develop on the inside of my car. Its like a trophy earned for not driving. Tonight however, things got a little out of control!

Awaking from a nap at about 10pm, I stumbled into the bathroom to find a large spider crawling up the side of the door. Fine, I’ve dealt with these hoodlems before. Then stepping out to the kitchen for some dinner I was a little perturbed to find that the spider I had left in the corner this morning had proceeded to extend its web across the main path and was dangling in the middle of the room. Harumpf! My patience had run out so I stepped into the spare bedroom to grab the vacuum. Suddenly it was like I had stepped into the horror movie that I had watched years ago where the world was taken over by spiders and ended with a zoom out on the planet completely engulfed in a giant spider web. There was silk everywhere, and tiny baby spiders crawling all about – probably at least one hundred of the little buggers! I looked down at my bicycle and they were crawling all over the handlebars. I looked up and they were all over the ceiling sending out silk zip lines all about the room. For a moment I was caught in a trance – simultaneously shocked at the hideousness and bewildered by the beauty. “Snap out of it man!” Somebody had obviously been a bit too prolific, and unless I wanted to wake up in the morning wrapped in a cocoon I had to do something about the situation.

So after much vacuum carnage and about an hour later, I was spider free but forever traumatized. From now on only one spider is welcome around here.