Heart Attack on Legs~

Spiders are freaky. I mean , they’re interesting, yes, from behind glass, heh. 😉  My boys had two of them for pets ,  Mexican tarantulas, that they captured themselves.  Here, in Arkansas , in the fall they go looking for mates and travel across the roads where they are quite easy to spot. If you are an adventurous boy, catching one ( or two) in a Mason jar is something of a rite of passage.  You keep them in an aquarium which can be really beautiful , with plants , other foliage and limbs, where you feed them live crickets.  I didn’t mind all that.  But here’s the thing, also here in Arkansas we have lots of other species of spiders, MANY of which make it into our homes on a regular basis, and yes, two of them ARE the famous Latrodectus mactans and Loxosceles reclusa. (Oh yes, the black widow and the brown recluse.) Check out this picture here, 

This lovely eight-legged freak is called a Wolf Spider. They like to come indoors when it starts to get cold. Last week it had rained for about four days straight and was unseasonably warm for the end of the year. Then suddenly it was winter again.  I was sleeping quite nicely when I was rudely awakened by the sensation of what I was “dreaming”  was something furry crawling down my cheek.  Now I’m EXTREMELY paranoid about moving objects in my bed, and I’m a ultra-light sleeper, so I jolted awake, flinging “whateveritwasthatwasslinkingdownmyface”  as far as I could across the room.  Turns out , it was a wolf spider.   ACTUALLY sized about as large as the one in the photo, legs and all.  I near to died.  Needless to say, this experience did not do my tachycardic heart condition any good, crazy thing took several years off my life, I swear. I’m wondering if putting up a tiny little rope up around my bed will work for spiders like it’s supposed to do for snakes? LOL  😀

The Midnight Escape of FRANCES~

The continuation of the furry, fun and creepy filled life…….
Well, we are two pets short today. After yesterday’s adventure of capturing a new tarantula from the wild to add to our first one, the boys were excited. We got the habitat all set up, and fed the new spider , somewhat dubiously named FRANCES. Supposedly, it was a boy spider , too, so not sure what happened with the choice of names there. They also fed our original female tarantula, (CHULINA). All was well. Seeing as how it was the weekend, the boys wanted to know if they could stay up late and watch tv, so I said sure. I wasn’t really sleepy either, and decided I’d catch up on some crochet, or maybe read for a while. Hubs had already gone to bed, and things were ginning along alright. I should have known better, right? We all finally decided to head to bed around midnight, when Den, (youngest son) comes barrelling into the living room and says breathlessly “We have a major problem.” This is definitely NOT what you want to hear from your 11 year old at midnight, let me tell you. So, I say, “What is it?” “Well, Momma, Frances has escaped.” Okay. Now I admit that yesterday, I posted that spiders do not creep me out as pets. But, I also was under the impression that these creatures were SECURELY stowed away in their nifty little habitats, NOT giddying around in my house at night. So, off to wake up the hubs I go, explaining that we must now do a midnight room overhaul looking for a 4 inch spider lurking in what amounts to a jungle of legos, transformer toys, and seemingly endless piles of dirty clothes. To his credit , he did not just roll his eyes , roll over and go back to sleep. He DID get up and perform said room check. The wildest and hairiest thing happened after that. We realized that not only Frances had made good his getaway, but ALSO Chulina had somehow managed to jailbreak as well. When I said life was never dull around here, you thought I was joking , didn’t you? 🙂 So, anyhow, we DID get all the eight -legged fugitives rounded back up , and decided that perhaps Frances and Chulina should be returned to the wilds of the great outdoors to make little spiderlings together, and live happily ever after. And the moral of this story is , Confucius say ” He who catches and keeps tarantulas, loses much sleep.”