just shy of pretty

Giant Spider. Giant. Spider. Giant. F-ing. Spider.

June 12, 2009 at 3:55 pm (Day to Day, Pictures) (Arachnid, Black, Crawling, Day to Day, Giant Spider, Hairy, Huge, Kitchen, Large, Pictures, Quarter, Spiders, Tarantula, Tealight, Wildlife)

Eeewww. Yuk. Creeped out. Goosebumps. Hair standing up. Bleh bleh bleh…. Still.

I almost went into cardiac arrest last night getting up to turn off the light.

The LARGEST. The HAIRIEST. The BLACKEST. The CREEPIEST. Spider I have EVER seen in a house, was on my floor last night. Chilling and reading a magazine. I think I saw a cup of coffee in one of his hands? Claws? Pincers? Yuck. Yuck. And Yuck.

I’m no baby about wildlife. I’m not really afraid of spiders. The concrete slab we live on is full of creatures from the underworld that like to come topside every now and then to remind us that we are NOT alone. Fine. Whatever. But this was NOT a “spider”. This was a SPIDER. Like how a tarantula is a spider. Huge and in its own weight class. Yuck. Just typing it is making me feel all creepy inside.

Ok. So I see it, from across the room. Stop dead. Like not moving. I was immovable. Like stone. I barely looked at the BF to alert him to the situation. He saw it. You really couldn’t miss it. I’d say it was the size of a tealight candle. A black, hairy, tarantula tealight on my beige carpet.

Now, if you don’t think that a tealight is all that big and most likely not scary, try scattering  a few of them around on your floor and then decide. And remember: It’s a spider. It can move. Fast. A hairy, black, fast-moving tealight. Yeah. No thanks.

I sneak into the kitchen so it doesn’t see me and get like, 10 papertowels in a bunch, to hand off to the BF. The BF made ONE step toward the spider and it just casually backed into the space between the TV and a speaker. Like, whatever, good luck, you ain’t getting me, I SEE you.

OMG! A spider with acute vision and brains. It’s like a damn hamster. Luckily it had no where to go except back out the front.  The BF could see it from the top with a flashlight, just sitting there on the floor. The BF says, “If I just had something to coax it out with, like a stick or something…” Oh, OK. Good idea. I get the backscratcher. Straight, long, even has the curvy, scratch part you can use like a handle!

So the BF  puts the stick down into his spider lair and holds the papertowels by the opening between the furniture. (I am way over on the other side of the room, by the kitchen door. I did go get a shoe to smash him with, just in case he made a dash my way, but I wasn’t looking to be a hero.)

I wish I was lying when I say the BF was literally, NUDGING this giant ass spider out between the two walls of the furniture. Nudging it like a mouse or a gerbil or a CAT. Yikes! I’m like, “Can you see it?” He says, “Oh yeah…he’s coming.”

What?!? Oh geez…it’s like pushing a fussy child toward the other kids on the playground. The spider had, like, 6 of his legs all locked down and in fighting stance while the BF is trying to push it out into the open with a back scratching stick that seems woefully too short at this point. The spider was holding onto the stick with his other 2 legs and trying to wrestle it away from the BF. Like tug-of-war, arachnid style. Thank god, I was not home alone. I would have had to go to a hotel or something. There was no way I would have been able to sleep knowing that spider was just hanging out, waiting for it to get dark, so it could come out and crawl on me. I’d throw it a sandwich and get the hell out of there.

Since this is real life and NOT a movie, the humans prevailed. The spider was overpowered; pushed into the light and squeezed to death in a wad of papertowels. I promise you, there was no way I was able to take a picture. I could not stop shaking from the heebie-jeebies. Trust that this spider was huge. No exaggeration. The BF is very level-headed and not prone to over embellishing a story like I might do….and even he said, very casually, “yeah, that’s a pretty big spider…”

So there you have it. A pretty big spider. Pretty dead spider now. I do feel kind of bad though. We had a large spider, (female, I chose to believe at the time–just a guess–nothing scientific), hanging out on our kitchen window. The outside. She had a huge web strung from window to house to eave, and she was just SO big! I felt that a creature that fearsome and strong, that could survive long enough to get that big, deserved to live and be left alone. I would just give the window a WIDE berth when going past to get in the back door. Those kinds of spiders jump when they’re startled and I did not want it jumping on me. Legs out, fangs sinking into my neck. I’d be dead before I even hit the ground from the shock. Mouth open, heart stopped, pants crapped. There wouldn’t even be a sound. She hung around for a few weeks and then she was gone.

At the end of summer last year, we had another large spider hanging off the free standing basketball pole/net thing we have next to the garage. This spider wasn’t so smart, though just as fearsome, and pretty lucky apparently. It was huge, but couldn’t seem to get the hang of stringing a web from the basketball pole to the garage. Too much gap. It finally settled on the garage gutter before it disappeared into winter. This one I took pictures of. I was scared the whole time but I think I captured it’s terrifying essence.

Keep in mind, the pictures are close-up, and against a standard roof top gutter. It is huge. It was huge.

But this one was still SMALLER than the one inside the house. If that was a quarter, again, the one in the house was a TEALIGHT. Wearing pants.

Take a big drink. Swallow. And peek through your fingers at these:

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