Spider Update

It's been awhile since my last post. Long enough that I figured it was time to pry open the dust buster, which took a feat of superhuman strength to do. And when Mark finally got it open, the spider was STILL ALIVE and waving at me from inside. Naturally, I did what anyone (with an unnatural terror of spiders) in that situation would do. I screamed like a little girl, abandoned my son and husband to their own devices, and ran willy nilly across the kitchen into the living room, where I continued to shriek hysterically (while jumping around) until Mark PROMISED me he'd killed it. Then, just to be safe, I emptied a pot of pasta into the trash on top of its corpse AND took out the garbage.

Jen was screaming as much as I was, although that might have been because I was panicking her with my screaming.

AAAAGGGGHHHH!!!

I was getting a coffee cup out of the cabinet this morning when I felt a great disturbance in the Force, causing me to look up the ceiling. Above my head was a large, black spider. Actually, it was more of a medium-sized black spider. Larger than a jumping spider, smaller than a wolf spider. Not hairy. Big, jointed legs. White spot in its torso. Anyway, I immediately assumed it was a black widow spider because, of course, I live in the desert and it's hot here, so therefore it must be a black widow spider. OK, I don't live in the desert and it's winter. Maybe it came in on the bananas. And sure, it was a white spot of some sort, not a red hourglass. Every internet search I did on the topic brought back "black widow spider," feeding into my terror.

Anyway, it was on the ceiling, so I was concerned that, should I stand on a chair to squish it, I might somehow miss (it's happened), causing it to fall either on me (probably down my sleeve), or onto the floor, where it would scurry away under the refrigerator and bide its time until it crept out and ate me.

SO. I just got a new dust buster a few days ago. I snatched it up and sucked the spider into it. As I sat here at the counter, my thoughts kept returning to the spider. Is it dead? Can it get out and hide under the refrigerator, biding its time until it eats me? I tried to pry open the dust buster to empty the basket and smash the spider to death (with my shoe, not with Noah, as my son would have done). However, the dust buster is so securely locked, I can't puzzle out how to open it. I'm thinking about throwing the whole thing away, just in case.

I'm not crazy.

P.S. I tried looking it up, but the pictures of spiders are freaking me out so much that I now feel like my skin is crawling. Kind of like that time we were invaded by ants, and I felt like my skin was crawling all the time, and then I looked down at my sleeve and there was an ant IN IT and I threw it across the room and threatened to move out of the house if Mark didn't come home and spray THAT INSTANT (I was pregnant, not that that completely explains my wigginess).

Baby Irony

Today, Josh picked up his Little People Noah (as in that guy who built an Ark) and crunched a ladybug with it. I tried to explain to him that it would have been funnier if he'd squished two, but he didn't really seem to get it.

BBC Book List Meme (27)

I can't find any real reference from the BBC to this Meme, but it turned up on Facebook as a tag-you're-it just recently. Basically, you list the 100 books, then highlight the one's you've actually read...and then shame your friends into admitting that they prefer owning books to reading books. Just a reminder, I don't like most literature prior to...say...1980. An ironic trait for an English major.

BBC Reading List

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (and zombies?)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (does this count 7 times?)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (does this count times?)

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (We couldn't narrow this down? I mean, I've read alot of Shakespeare, but not the COMPLETE FREAKING WORKS. I'm still counting it.)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (now why isn't the entire Narnia series listed, just book 3?)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (sorry, Nicolas Cage killed this for me)

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (we own it! LJ read it.)

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (I made it three pages into this one before returning it to the library)

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (Hmm. Good movie. Maybe I'll get this.)

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (and zombies?)

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (don't read this if you have kids.)

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (does the musical count?)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (I used to have a subscription!)

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (didn't we cover this with the COMPLETE WORKS??)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo