Spidergeddon

I live alone.  I live alone in a nice apartment by a large lake with my two cats.  Sometimes I'll see a spider here and there, usually far away from me.  My motto with spiders:  Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone.

Unless they are daddy long-legs.  I'm sorry, but have you SEEN those things?  First off, there is never just one.  They come in packs.  Even if you only see one, there's about 50 lurking just outside of your view.  They are waiting and watching and I know they are making plans for world domination.

"Ceiling spiders watching you sleep."

When you see one, just remember to look all around you for more.  And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't forget to look up!

But back to the original story.  So last night, I'm playing my turns on Kingdom of Loathing when I see something to my left out of the corner of my eye.  I pause and look over.  It's a wolf spider.

Now, something else to know about spiders.  They come in multiple sizes, that can be described as thus:

Tiny:  This is the spider you see on your car windshield and just notice before the wipers make it paste.

Small: Enough to make you look twice, but never really that bothersome.

Medium: Okay.  Look.  You can stay and eat flies, but don't come out of that corner.

Large: If I ignore it, maybe it will go away.  Pleasepleasepleaseplease don't come near me.

Humongous (Or as I call it - Jesus Christ, it's going to eat the children!):   Let me just have this tiny corner of YOUR room and please don't kill me while I move all my furniture into a 1x1x1 area.  Okay?  Okay.

The wolf spider was about medium size.  I was okay with it, it was ignoring me and moving in the other direction.  Awesome.  I go back to running turns while trying to keep my eye on it, just in case it decides it would rather try tasty human flesh versus fly tar tar again.  

While this happens, a flash of gray zips by to the other side of the room.  From where ever my gray cat, Corrigan, had wedged herself, she had spotted something that caught her attention.  

My first mistake was looking.  With a yelp that probably woke dogs in a 2 mile radius of my apartment, I was out of my chair and backing up into the coffee table.  With what I could only assume was the mac-daddy of all wolf spiders, a humongous wolf spider was on the OTHER side of the living room from the smaller one, sitting by the cat tree.  (Now we know what the smaller one was running away from!)

Me:  OH crap.  OH crap oh crap oh crap.

It was about this time that I started looking for something to smash it with, because while I do have a live and let live policy, but I swear this guy was looking for trouble.  I was half expecting to spot gang markings and a switchblade somewhere on this guy.

Corrigan:  Mew?  (Smacks it with her paw.)

Here's where it got to the point that I just wanted to run to the other room.  My cat, brave cat that she is, smacks it with a paw.  She then jumps about a foot straight up in the air and runs behind her cat tree.

All I can think at this point is that it reached up with it's legs and smacked her back.  So cowering behind the cat tree, she eyes this spider as it makes it's way with a rambling walk over towards the living room light. 

"Bitch.  I will cut you."

She follows it, meowing all the time, and giving me looks that say, "Mom, why aren't you killing it?  Why are you letting this thing live??"

She doesn't even attempt to touch it again.  

Finally, my calico, Aideen, known as the "will eat anything" cat, wakes up from her perch atop the couch.  How she managed to sleep through my repeated mantra of "Ohcrapohcrapohcrap" I don't know, but she did.  She sees Corrigan stalking something and immediately wants it.  Because that's how she is.

She gets her nose down there, and she drags a paw over to the spider.  She touches it, and gets her mouth down to try and shovel the whole thing in there.  For a moment, I was hoping it was over.   Oh, no, instead, she backs up quickly and then looks up at me, confused.  And squeaks at me.

So now both cats are avoiding this thing like the plague.  When it finally ran under the television stand, I breathed a sigh of relief and went to sit back down.

But I did block all the entrances and exits from the stand with books**.  Get out of THAT one.

**I am half afraid that when I get home today, the books will have been pushed back from under the TV stand.  If that happens, I'm going to pack my cats and move until an exterminator not only gets there, but can show me the dangling dead body of that spider.