*high-pitched girly scweam of heebie-jeebies*

Okay, I want to start by making one thing clear: I am not that female stereotype you see everywhere in the media, the one who freaks out at mice skittering across the floor or because there's a spider the size of a pinhead on the wall at the other side of the room.

I may in fact be a little too far to the opposite extreme, as evidenced by my reaction when we saw a wild (scraggy, disease-carrying) rat taking a running jump into the stream last night.

It was something along the lines of, "Ooh, I've never seen one swim before! Aaahh look at its little legs going! Heeheehee! Cuuuuuuute!"

As you can imagine, this was met with a long pause and a very understanding, "Yes, dear."

I also have little fear of spiders, although the time I felt a tickle on my wrist and found a house spider that could have bear-hugged my iPod Shuffle on my hand, I did instinctively yelp and flip it off there before I realised what was going on.

Now, that said - this morning I met a spider. Not just any spider, but the biggest, hairiest, longest-leggiest, freakishly-hugest-palps-that-look-like-another-pair-of-legs...iest(? I'll stop the superlatives now) alien-like THING I have ever seen outside of a heated tank in a pet shop.

I just stared at it for a bit. I don't think I was quite sure that it was really there, since I had only just got out of bed and zombied my way to the bathroom, and probably was still firm in my belief that I could summon towels to fly across the room to me by will alone. After I had been staring at it for a while and it still hadn't melted or asked me for a cup of coffee, I had to come to the conclusion that yes, I was awake, and yes, this freakish little motherfucker had really been sitting a foot away watching me pee.

This one, right here. Feel a tickle on your ankle?

Amazingly, a combination of scientific curiosity and home pride won out over thoughts of squishing the thing flat before it escaped to spread its story, and maybe eat a baby or something. I caught it in a glass and put it in the kitchen sink with thoughts of offering its carcass as tribute to the Lord High Knower of Creepy-Crawly Knowledge (Blaise).

Some amount of water and about 20 minutes later, the thing was still floating about the sink and apparently just waiting for me to get the water level high enough for it to walk out. At this point I gave up on waiting for it to "accidentally" drown and tried pouring a glass of water over it.

It now wasn't moving and had curled up into a little ball ("little" being the size of a big marble), so after a bit I let the plug out, just wanting to be rid of it.

As a final "fuck you", it got stuck in the plughole.

At this point I just sighed and went to get a ziploc bag, figuring I could at least have something interesting to show Blaise out of all this. Of course, when I turned back to the sink, the spider was fully dry, back from the dead and climbing the walls of the sink with renewed vigour and a raised middle finger to the human world (how can it raise fingers when it has none? It came back from the dead. Are you really going to tell it what it can't do?).

All spiders talk this way. Fact.

At some point when I was being sassed by the resurrected spider, Han-Ley had zombied his way into the kitchen in search of coffee.

Let's just make another thing clear: unlike me, Han-Ley does not generally just "not mind" spiders. Han-Ley hates spiders. Hates with the burning passion of a thousand suns, if all those suns burn with the wish to destroy spiders.

And now, Han-Ley had wandered fuggily into the kitchen and was staring into his own kitchen sink at a spider the size of a baby mouse, which was cheerfully waving four legs and two feck-off huge palps back at him in greeting.

There was complete silence while he stared, unreacting, for about a minute. He blinked a few times, presumably to check if the spider would still be there afterwards. Watching him, I got an idea of what I must have looked like while I was waking up to the spider previously.

He quietly said, "What the fuck."

Then he squished it with a glass.

-----

Epilogue:

The spider is stuck in the plughole again.