SPIDERS!

I am not ashamed to admit that I have a mild case of arachnophobia (sp??). I'm the kind of person who kills spiders by throwing shoes from across the room to avoid getting anywhere near them. So, all my life I've waited for my knight in shining armor to come along, sweep me off my feet, and kill any spider that got within a mile of me with one swift stomp of his foot. I'm still waiting. Austin got the "sweep my off my feet" part down, but he's no Orkin man. Ok. He does do most of the spider killing around our house, but not without throwing a few shoes and yelling a few profanities. We seem to suffer from the same phobia......so, of course our house hosts every species of spiders in these 50 states.

I first got worried when I began noticing wolf spiders around the kitchen and back yard. Those are the brown ones that carry lots of nasty little spider babies around on their backs. Then it was the big, hairy, jumping spider that lives in the fence near my hose and seems to be immortal. This awful discovery was followed by my neighbor's horror stories about finding brown recluses in every corner of her house. As if that wasn't bad enough, Austin found a dead lizard behind our little back yard storage house and realized that it had been killed by our resident BLACK WIDOW! (Yes, you read that right - we had a black widow living right next to the back door....is any one else getting the creepy crawlies right now??)

Since I have this horrible fear of those nasty 8-legged creatures, I keep a lethal stash of home defense sprays and dusts, but they don't seem to be as effective as I would like. Last night while I was brushing my teeth, Austin started yelling for me to "come here". I ran, followed by a stream of drooly toothpaste, down the stairs - wondering what could be so horrible as to merit such frantic yelling. Then I saw it. The largest, scariest spider of my whole life. I don't know what it was. It was black with yellowy spots and an extremely thick web. It was hanging down in front of the back door (outside luckily). So we both got crazy and start digging for spider killer. Austin found some under the sink, sprayed the nasty thing like crazy, and then hit it with a flip flop a few times. Eww. Its huge dead body is still laying outside the door.
When I get home today I plan on spraying and then dusting every corner of our house - inside and out - chemical warfare. I hope Cooper doesn't turn into a mutant.