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Your One Stop Shop For Bad Grammer!
Lately I have been the victim of many Strange Encounters of the Insect Kind. Ok, maybe they’re not so much strange as numerous, but if you think that’s going to stop me from using that cool sentence you are sorely mistaken, mister. We have actually been fairly lucky for IV as far as the apartment : insect ratio goes. I have heard horror stories about monster invasions of ants and cockroaches the size of dinner plates (this one from my mom’s intern, you can bet Mom was happy to have me living here after that ... thanks Amanda!) All things considered we’ve been blessed by the (lack of) insect gods. You know that saying that there is never “just one ant.” I have always agreed with that wholeheartedly. Then we moved in here and, guess what, there is totally such a thing as just one ant. I’ll be sitting at my desk and one lone and lorn little arthropod will come trotting across on a sight seeing tour and he’ll look at me all, “Hi! Which way to the campgrounds?” and whip out his camera and I’ll look at him all, “Nuh-uh buddy!” and SMOOSH! No more ant. And no other ants. I don’t wake up in the morning with an ominous black trail snaking its way across my desk, taking my keyboard hostage in a demand for ant civil rights. There was just. One. Ant. I demand that my apartment be examined by the Bureau for Investigation of Paranormal Activity. Another insect we don’t have is flies. I tell you it is hot as hell here lately and the only way to have any kind of livable condition inside our (non-ventilated) apartment is to leave the front door open, creating a cross breeze. But still, no flies, not one. At home, when the door is left open for more than the one millisecond it takes to squeeze your body out into the yard every single fly within a four mile radius takes that as an invitation to dwell in high style for a while. “Hey guys! No more dog poop, we can land on their dinner tonight!” When I was little we actually each had our own fly swatter, each a different color, that’s how bad the fly situation was. Ok, granted I spent most my time and energy swatting my little brother, but you get the picture. What we do have here is spiders. Oh god, do we have spiders. I’m not one of those people who are deathly afraid of spiders, but they do kinda give me the heebies. A Daddy-Long legs or two I can handle, but in general? Eeeuch! So when I started to see spiders crawling up and down my walls here I wasn’t precisely thrilled. I realized that the state of my room (that state being approximately “federally declared disaster site”) provides spiders with lots of fun little dark nooks and crannies to hide and breed in. Never mind that those dark nooks and crannies are my clothes. So I’ve taken to shaking everything before I pick it up or put it on. What? Cleaning would have taken too much time. I’m not just paranoid either. Spiders totally do live in your clothes. I commented to my roommate Ash the other day about the amount of insect bites on the inside of her calf and she said there must have been a spider in her sock when she put it on. “Oh, oka-- woah now, HOLD THE FUCK ON! Are you telling me there was a SPIDER in your SOCK?” “Yeah, the bites weren’t there before I put them on and now they are, so...” shrug “How, oh God how, could you not notice a SPIDER IN YOUR SOCK.” shrug “Dunno.” “SPIDER! Eee! SOCK! Agh! Oh my god.” “Ok, calm down, its just a spider.” “Holy Jesus, I am never wearing socks again.” So lately I’ve begun to get vaguely paranoid about spiders. That which never bothered me much before, now bothers me extremely. Like, I feel spiders on me all the time. In fact, while I was typing that last paragraph? I swatted at at least three imaginary spiders. Swat!There’s another. I’m also freaking out about the type of spiders. I grew up in San Diego, which has a huge population of Black Widows so I know from deadly spiders. All the ones I’ve seen here are brown, though. Phew! Oh my god. Brown Recluse. There are totally Brown Recluses in my apartment and I’m going to put on a SOCK one day and DIE. Swat! I spent about an hour surfing the internet the other day, Googling terms like “Santa Barbara spiders,” “common spider symptoms,” (Swat!) “how to identify spiders,” “Spider California,” and “spiders in socks.” What I came up with everywhere was something like this, “[T]here are no populations of the brown recluse (Loxosceles reclusa), in the state and fewer than 10 verified specimens have been collected over several decades in California.” But ... but, there was this girl in my class last year who had this big nasty looking bite she said was from a Brown Recluse. She said the doctors told her there was a large population in IV. “ ... people frequently relate stories in which they or someone they know was supposedly bitten by a brown recluse in California. This is not true. There have been fewer than five cases of Brown recluse bites reported in California over the past two decades.” ... Oh. Swat! So, there are no Brown Recluses in California. The spiders in our apartment (from what I could determine through extensive internet research) are probably just common garden spiders (who hide in your SOCK.) Swat! I actually started this entry intending to recount all sorts of odd insect encounters I’ve had lately including last week when a bee got stuck in my hair, but the SPIDER! SOCK! thing kind of took over. I hope this was helpful. I’ve learned a lot about spiders and their habitats over that last few weeks. I’m glad to pass that information on, in the hopes of becoming a mature, non-spider-freaking-out person in the future. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go put some bug spray on my imaginary spider bites and shake out my socks. Swat! 5:24 p.m. May 16, 2004
“Y’all aren’t from around here, are ya.” - August 21, 2005 |
The Many And Scary Ways They Get Here Quote of the Day
"They have lots of disturbing cross sections of animal reproductive organs"
Worried by The fact that I just walked upstairs and saw one of my new housemates standing on her desk chair slowly revolving in circles for no apparent reason. Good Reads
Tomato Nation Fun
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Copter Game Useful |
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