Armed and Ready!

Bring on the spiders! I'm ready for them!

Look at this brilliant gadget I found at the Australian Geographic shop. A mere $24.95 is a tiny price to pay for such peace of mind.

The Spider Catcher is about 60cm long. The cone-shaped “spider” end is made of a circle of thick plastic bristles. The bristles are actuated by a sort of trigger device at the “people” end.


It even comes with a fake plastic spider that you can practise on. (A very small practice spider, I must say). I hope this gadget can handle something the size of the spidey-friends who invade my house. Ernestine had a body the size of a baby mouse, after all...

But anyway. I remain optimistic.

The fake spider has already given me seven kinds of heart attack because I keep forgetting where I put it, and every time I catch a glimpse of it I jump. Then I practise catching it.

This is how it works:

Giant spider comes into the house and breaks the Prime Directive (i.e., it gets within reach of Betty the Brave, nemesis of giant spiders).

Betty, armed with her gadget, whoops with delight and gently scoops the wriggling spider into the waiting bristles.


Here's a spider's-eye view:


So - spidey is gently and securely (I hope!) held in its prison of bristles. Like this:


It is then taken (at arm's length) out where it belongs, and liberated in the garden, where it will live a long and happy life (or be snapped up by a hungry bird. Nature's cruel like that.)


Betty runs for her life (note to self: wait till you can actually run again before attempting this!)

Muwahahahahaha! Never again will I cower as the spiders take over my house. Eight-legged Ernestines, Henrys and Maximilians of the world – look out!

Note: No real spiders were harmed during the creation of this post.

Ernest(ine)? Is that you?

Remember this, from my 18 December post?

The giant spider currently in my kitchen may or may
not be Ernest(ine). It's a lot less bulbous in the abdomen these days. I have
pondered this, and come to the following possible conclusions:

• It is a rival giant spider - which could mean I have
  TWO giant spiders in my house at the moment.


• It is a rival giant spider and it ate Ernest(ine).
  If that's the case, I have one giant spider, but it's clearly of the predatory
  persuasion. And it knows where I sleep.


• It is Ernest(ine). She has laid an enormous egg-sac
  somewhere, and regained her girlish figure.

As you know, the spider I thought was Ernest(ine) - or someone rather like her - was sadly despatched just before Christmas when she broke the Prime Directive. I am, however, assuming the new and terrifying (as yet unnamed) giant spider in my loo - which looks a lot like the old Ernest(ine) of the big belly - may in fact be the original Ernest(ine), empowered to reappear by the demise of her rival giant spider. Or of course, it could be the ghost of Ernest(ine), come back to haunt me for murdering her. Or it could be a new giant spider altogether - it's not like there's a shortage of them in Canberra. Great.

I learned some interesting things this morning; chiefly, that the presence of a giant spider in the loo:

• can actually inhibit the peristaltic imperative!
• can cause a normally sane person to develop a sudden insane desire to be at the office instead.

My bedroom is across the hallway from the loo, and my vantage point - that is to say, my bed - is probably 3.5 metres away from where the hairy behemoth is currently located, high up on the loo wall. I was disturbed to realise that I could see the whites of her eyes from that distance! OK, teensy exaggeration... Even from such a distance, though, I could count all her legs - count all the hairs on all her legs, even - and was fascinated to watch as she scratched her bum with an enormous hairy leg, and then lazily turned around 360 degrees before scratching it again. Maybe she has worms... That's all I need - a spider with worms.

I'm glad I didn't make a New Year's resolution along the lines of "I will be braver about giant spiders", coz I would've broken it only 2 days into the new year...

Vale Ernest(ine)

You remember the night she arrived? You know... the night that I had to use the Whiz?

That night I called her Ernest, but suspected she might be an Ernest(ine), and Ernest(ine) she has remained. Till now.

It is my sad duty to inform you that Ernest(ine) is no more. She is an ex-spider. She has shuffled off this mortal coil and - oops, sorry, Monty Python almost intervened there....

Ernest(ine), as I said, is no more. She violated The Rule. I only have one Rule - to steal a term from Star Trek - it's the Prime Directive. The Prime Directive for spiders in Chez Betty is this - stay up high. Sheesh, it's not rocket science!

But poor Ernest(ine) - after a couple of weeks of wandering around the house, partaking of whatever dubious joys there may have been Up High, Ernest(ine), for reasons only known to herself, decided to venture to more low-lying areas... and that, as they say in the classics, was that.

I tried to ignore it when she pushed a few boundaries, and came down to below eye level on my kitchen shelves. Honest, I did. I really hate having to enforce the Prime Directive.

But when she came into my bedroom, crawled lower and lower on the wardrobe door and eventually ran towards me across the carpet and disappeared under my bed.... I'm sorry. It was me or her...

I screamed and ran for the chemical warfare bottle. I felt so bad... I squirted poison in the general under-bed direction, and then ran like mad. I believe that a poisoned spider is a desperate and unpredictable spider. Ernest(ine) lived up to the hypothesis. Every time her poisoned neurons perceived my presence she made a desperate run TOWARDS me - so there was a bizarre spider-dodging dance as I tried to extract my tankbag from my bedroom, so that I could go to work - cunningly blocked by a dying and discombobulated Ernest(ine).

It was horrible, I tell you, horrible!

Eventually I grabbed the tankbag and made a run for it.. I paid for my haste when I arrived at work without my security pass and had to explain myself to the smirking security guards.

When I arrived home Ernest(ine) was curled in a noble heap of hairy legs in the midde of my living room floor... and I felt very sad. I also felt too scared to move her, in case she was playing possum... so she lay in state for 2 days before heading to a resting place at the bottom of my new Trash-Pak.

Vale Ernest(ine). I am sad about him/her. Honest. S/he was a good and gutsy spider.

Four Legs Good, Eight Legs SCARY

Did I ever tell you about the time I slept with my helmet?

It was the night that Gary Spider first appeared. Gary ended up being one of my most long-term spidey residents, and I felt a kind of grudging respect for him, mixed in with the terror that his spideyness inspired.

I heard him arrive. I'm serious - his hairy spidey legs actually made a sound as they scuttled down my hallway at warp speed. I thought it was an enormous mouse, and then it thundered across my bedroom floor and took up temporary residence on the bottom drawer handle of my chest of drawers. My helmet was sitting on top of the chest - a nice dark inviting hiding-place for a spidey refugee.

Now, I don't know about you, but I think sharing a car with a giant spider is bad enough. I've been known to abandon said car in traffic, when a giant spider has appeared from one of the vents. The thought of one of those hairy-legged suckers suddenly appearing on the inside of my visor, an INCH from my face while I'm out riding my bike - well, let's just say it haunts me. It happened to my friend Tempo once, and he survived to tell the tale. I wouldn't stand a chance.

So when I realised it was only a short spidey trip from the drawer handle to my helmet, I sprang into action. GO GO GADGET ARMS - I willed my arms to stretch further than ever before as I balanced on one leg, high on tiptoe and poised for flight, and snatched my precious helmet away. The safest place to put it was under the doona, right next to me. Sweet dreams...

Gary Spider eventually lived in every room in the house, but preferred the bathroom. There were some very scary moments when the steam in the bathroom made him lose traction. He would start sliding down the wall, closer and closer to my unclothed self... and I'm not sure who was more terrified! He'd be scrabbling like mad to climb higher, away from the madwoman who yelled "Don't come any closer, Gary, or I'll have to -!" (have to what? Concede defeat and give up my house? Run naked to a safer, spidey-free suburb?)

The day that I accidentally TOUCHED Gary Spider - ugh, I can barely recount the tale. I grabbed the bottle of saline so I could rinse my contact lenses, and got a fistful of Huntsman. The bottle and the spider flew towards the ceiling while I fled the room screaming. When I returned to the scene of the crime, Gary Spider was marching furiously up and down on 'his' bottle of saline where it had landed in the sink. I risked all sorts of ocular disasters that day by wearing unrinsed contacts. It seemed safer.

When the Bathroom Man came to renovate my bathroom, I got a bit worried about Gary. He'd gone into hiding, as he regularly did, and I suspected he had a little spidey hideaway behind a cupboard in the bathroom.

"Bathroom Man," I said, shuffling my feet and feeling a little silly, "Um, behind that cupboard is my pet spider. He's been living here for MONTHS now. When you pull out the cupboard..."

"Ja," said Bathroom Man, "if zat damn schpider shows its face -" He made a horrible SPLAT movement with his hands, and grinned. "Ja, it be shit rrreal fast, don't you vorry".

In desperation I called my friend Tempo, babbling about a race against time. I couldn't let the unsuspecting Gary be squashed by a cold-hearted tradesman who had no concept of the History Gary and I had...

What a pal. Tempo came and found Gary, who had obligingly come out of hiding, and bravely transported him outside in one of my rice bowls (I won't tell you which one, heh heh!) My hero!

I never saw Gary again. I like to think that he took his rightful place in the outside world, safe from the snapping beaks of hungry birds. The Huntsman spider lives for about 2 years, and I hope he lived a full and happy life Out There.

I wonder if Ernest(ine) is one of his grandchildren?

The giant spider currently in my kitchen may or may not be Ernest(ine). It's a lot less bulbous in the abdomen these days. I have pondered this, and come to the following possible conclusions:

• It is a rival giant spider - which could mean I have TWO giant spiders in my house at the moment.
• It is a rival giant spider and it ate Ernest(ine). If that's the case, I have one giant spider, but it's clearly of the predatory persuasion. And it knows where I sleep.
  
• It is Ernest(ine). She has laid an enormous egg-sac somewhere, and regained her girlish figure. If so, I can expect my ceiling to be covered by hundreds of tiny, perfect huntsbabies sometime soon. I will have to dodge them as they abseil from the ceiling on tiny threads of web - or perhaps let them abseil onto my arms - they're very cute and non-threatening when they're tiny.

Sometimes I think chemical warfare would be so much easier - but I can't get past the thought that a poisoned giant spider is an angry and unpredictable giant spider... and I don't think I could stand that.

Whizzing Past Spiders

So tonight I walk out of my room into the dark hallway, and an enormous shadow detaches itself from the ceiling and abseils in a graceful arc in front of me. It drops to the floor and scuttles off. It's dark, so I could be mistaken, but it seems about the size of a small car.

Of course, barefoot and terrified of giant spiders, I jump up and down and scream a bit, and fumble for a lightswitch.

No sign of the giant spider, but I KNOW I glimpsed it abseilling and scuttling, and when I walk into its effing web I scream a bit more. The sticky rope clings to my hair, my shoulders, my back.... What if the spider is clinging to me as well?

Aaaaargh, I hate this!

I run around the house a few times, shimmying and shaking and waving my arms in the special spider-dislodging dance, then I check the bathroom, the loo and the study. No sign of anything enormous and eight-legged. (Aside: I'm not absolutely sure, but I think that's actually worse than seeing it and knowing where it is...)

After I spend the next half hour huddled in my room in abject terror (with my mate Johno laughing at me via Messenger), nature wants to take its course. Of course. Murphy's Law dictates that the wall behind the dunny will have become the favourite stopping place of Ernest the Giant Spider (they're marginally less terrifying if I name them). Of course again. Yep. That bugger is even bigger with the light
on...

A couple of years ago I bought a nifty device called a Whiz, which I thought would be ideal for those terrible times when you're caught short on the road and you don't want to have to drop your dacks in snake and spider territory. It's just the thing for big tough girl bikers with tragic bladders, ha ha.

I have diligently packed it on every long trip - but have never had the opportunity to try it out properly for real etc, by the side of the road,where God intended. Have had a couple of half-hearted attempts at home, butyou feel a bit silly really.

But not tonight. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Turning my back and baring my bum at a spider the size of New Zealand is something I simply cannot do.

Thanks Whiz. http://www.whizbiz.com.au/