I am very fond of spiders and I never eject them from my house. My wife thinks I do, but the reality is that they end up in some pot plant or other.
This is bad enough, but this morning as I lounged in bed in my hypnopompic state I noticed a handsomely-huge arachnid scuttling across the wall right next to my wife's side of the bed. After a minute or two, and presumably after it had satisfied itself as to the absence of food at its destination, it scuttled right back again. It is now somewhere around the head of the bed on her side. Naturally, I have said nothing about this. Were I to tell her of the presence of this minibeast but a foot or two from her head she would probably leave me for good, such is her entirely irrational fear of spiders. But I feel guilty knowing that she is up there now, blissfully unaware of this monster with whom, who knows, she may well right now be sharing the bed.
Should I tell her about this creature or should I leave her to remain blissfully aware? What am I going to say if it skitters across her face? Do I daft-man it and tell her I knew nothing about it? Hey, this is serious!
"Last night, among his fellow roughs,
He jested, quaff'd and swore."
They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the life that'll never, never die.
I'll live in you if you'll live in me -
I am the lord of the dance, said he!
There is no mistaking the swelling from a spider bite when you wake up. They are about 3-4 cm across and take weeks to stop itching and for the swelling to go back down. Depending on where it bites her, your life may or may not be worth living tomorrow.
djm
I'd rather be atop the foothills than beneath them.
Sometimes the bites turn into necrotizing ulcers. You can lose a limb easily. At least here you can. (I don't know, maybe English spiders are pansies.)
If I have time, I spray them with a fine mist of instant-freeze hairspray. That stops them in their tracks.
If I do not have time, i.e., they are TOO CLOSE, I just beat the living daylights out of them until they're nothing more than a faint smudge. No identifiable parts can remain--they have to be arachno-dust.
Spiders AND toads in my bed? Egads, Jerry, I hope you're joking! (I'm pretty sure you are...)
I live in the woods, lots of spiders and other creepy-crawlies all around, and some of them inevitably find their way inside nearly every day. They are, however, not welcome. I take a mid-Emmline/Lambchop route. If I have time, and the door is close, they get tossed back outside, where they belong. Otherwise, they get squashed, with no guilt on my part. (I do have a sliding scale of preference....Daddy-Long-Legs get off scot-free most times. I'm totally guilty of arachnid judgmentalism, or something like that.)
If I were you, Steve, out of respect for your wife and her fears, I'd squash that spider living near your bed. You'll be her hero, and although I realize you like the arachnids, you have to like your wife more. Right?
Every time I turn around, I wonder where I've been.
Time to stop turning round, I guess.
Don't tell her. It's almost certainly harmless, and what she doesn't know won't hurt either of them. If it does show up again, she doesn't need to know you've already seen it once. Besides, the crawly is almost certainly gone by now. The ones that are truly mobile, such as wolf spiders, tend to roam fairly widely...unlike the web builders who tend to stay in one place.
I'm an arachnaphobe (and when I say that, I mean the kind of person who has screaming nightmares about them) who also recognizes that spiders are generally harmless, almost always beneficial creatures who have done nothing to earn my emnity other than being born with 8 legs. I also know full well that the world around me is positively crawling with spiders. They say you're never more than 3 feet from a spider, and up here in the mountains, I'm sure it's true. The crawlies and I have come to an understanding: If I see one, I go away. By the time I come back, the spider is almost always gone, almost certainly never to be seen again. If it does hang around for a while, and is in a place I can't avoid (and that isn't big enough for me to tiptoe quietly around it), I ask my hubby to move it to another location (he's arachnaphobic as well, but not so severely...he can bear to pick one up with a broom and move it).
I also name them. Seriously...it makes them a little more bearable. "Legs," a big wolf spider, is perched in my bathroom right now. Giving him (or her...who can tell?) a pseudo personality makes him/her a bit less of a big scary monster.
I've even come to terms with the black widows, who really are shy, retiring creatures. They stay under the stairs; I don't go under the stairs. Live and let live.
All joking aside, though, I really wouldn't tell her. If she's severely arachnaphobic, it would just frighten her for no good reason. The chances are that she'll never see the spider...no need to give her nightmares.
Redwolf
...agus déanfaidh mé do mholadh ar an gcruit a Dhia, a Dhia liom!
We used to have a gizmo like a perspex pyramid on a stick, with a sliding flap on the base. You lowered this pyramid over the critter and rotated the stick until the flap closed of itself. Then you carried the whole affair outside and waggled it until it was empty.
My wife works from home now, and encounters more spiders than it is possible for me to rush home from work and deal with, so I was surprised to find she has another gizmo now.
It's a very wide tube, that looks as though it might be a toy light-sabre. But there is a vaccuum pump in the handle. I've never even used it, but I believe it gets a lot of use.
Last spider conversation I heard, it was too big to fit in the tube. I don't know what happened to that one....
(We have four cats, damnit! They need to earn their keep!)
I can't believe that anyone would crush a spider. All that mating, egg-laying, growing up, catching prey, building lovely, ornate webs (in some cases) and you're going to squash it to smithereens in a trice because it scared you! There are no harmful spiders in the UK. Several species of house spider, Tegenaria, are found, and these are the ones that startle by running fast across the carpet. Pholcus, the daddy-long-legs spider, with its impossible tangle of legs and small body, is the messiest one in terms of leaving dangly bits of web and sucked-dry wrapped-up prey lying around. These spiders need the house. In fact, the daddy-long-legs never lives outdoors in the UK. They thrive indoors by catching nasty little things such as flies and silverfish. We should forgive their slight messiness and leave them be. In most cases putting them outside is going to end their lives very quickly. I'll raise a glass of Doom Bar to the harmless and useful brigade of house spiders!
"Last night, among his fellow roughs,
He jested, quaff'd and swore."
They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the life that'll never, never die.
I'll live in you if you'll live in me -
I am the lord of the dance, said he!
Tell us something.: This is the first sentence. This is the second of the recommended sentences intended to thwart spam its. This is a third, bonus sentence!
I am very much like Redwolf.
Last week I woke up to an enormous 2" spider on my ceiling. I was traumatized the entire day. I thought at first it was a wolf spider since it was so large and roaming but I discovered, in front of my window, several blanketlike layers of web belonging to a few very large tunnelweb spiders. They were instantly sprayed and destroyed.
I bought some stuff that get's attached to a garden hose and can spray the entire house and yard but because of my back it'll probably have to wait until tomorrow.
As for Steve's dilemma, I would prefer not to know it's there but if it crawled within my vision or on me and I found that my SO knew is was there I would be very angry.
Flyingcursor wrote:I am very much like Redwolf.
Last week I woke up to an enormous 2" spider on my ceiling. I was traumatized the entire day. I thought at first it was a wolf spider since it was so large and roaming but I discovered, in front of my window, several blanketlike layers of web belonging to a few very large tunnelweb spiders. They were instantly sprayed and destroyed.
I bought some stuff that get's attached to a garden hose and can spray the entire house and yard but because of my back it'll probably have to wait until tomorrow.
As for Steve's dilemma, I would prefer not to know it's there but if it crawled within my vision or on me and I found that my SO knew is was there I would be very angry.
Except that Redwolf doesn't kill them. She's figured out how to live with them. Screaming nightmares and all.
Redwolf
...agus déanfaidh mé do mholadh ar an gcruit a Dhia, a Dhia liom!
SteveShaw wrote:I am very fond of spiders and I never eject them from my house. My wife thinks I do, but the reality is that they end up in some pot plant or other.
Maybe if she smoked some of it she'd lighten up?
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Balochi musician
brilliant 
