Saturday, 20 November 2010

ARACHNIDS ON THE MOVE

Just when I thought I had written my last spider blog, what should I confront while doing the vacuuming this morning but a very suspect spider web. It wasn’t there last night, and the last time I had seen a similar one appear overnight, in my kitchen utensils container no less, what crawled out was enough to make sure I was very careful in ferreting this one out.

Not a huge fella, but big enough and mean looking, a nasty piece of work. You know the sort, the ones you can't quite identify, but just by looking at them you know they’re not the sort to mess with. And was he in a nice accessible place? Of course not. He inconveniently decided to take up residence in the recliner chair, in the space between the back of the chair and the back cushion, lots of nice folds of material to crawl up in. So, with vacuum cleaner at the ready I sucked the web out of the way, gingerly pulled the cushion forward and hey presto there he was, pretending to be nice and innocent as if he had every right to be there, so in one fell swoop the big sucker did its job and he disappeared to the innards of the machine.

Not one to be satisfied that was the end of the ordeal, I thought it best to empty the bag once I’d finished vacuuming, for some spiders show remarkable resilience, and because I hadn’t actually squashed him I wasn’t sure if he’d actually choke to death in his dusty trap. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be an issue, but what I hadn’t mentioned was that before I started vacuuming I put a colour through my hair. I knew thirty minutes was all I needed to zoom from one end of the house to the other, but with this added task I was wondering what hair shade I would end up with.

So, there I was out in the back yard in my tatty old dressing gown, hair all gooed up and a towel round my shoulders, emptying the bag of its contents and going through it with a stick half expecting him to crawl out coughing and spluttering, but in typical fashion I couldn’t find the blighter.

Now, I didn’t think he could have had the strength or wherewithal to hang on to the inside of the tube, but I wasn’t taking that thing back inside if he was still in there. Took the bendy bit off the end to find there was a bunch of stuff clogging up the end of the tube so I thought I had him now. Was very brave and pulled it out with my fingers, very fast mind you, but still no spider. Out came the broom next, shoved the handle up the tube, up the bendy tube, took the head off the tube, no matter where I looked, he wasn’t appearing.

So, in the end, I had to assume he was actually curled up in all that dust, but just to make sure even though I’m 99.99% positive I sucked him up, I gave the chair a generous serving of surface spray, just in case it happened to be a she instead of a he and there were some eggs laid in there.

Hair ended up ok, but it looks like I’m still on the hit list, only hope this summer isn’t going to be as bad as the last.

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