I Don't Like Spiders or Snakes

I tried to get caught up on my gardening this afternoon. Started out okay. I was making progress with the weed patch that I'm planning to stick a few tomato plants in. Then it became rather apparent that I'd stumbled upon a spider's nest. Oodles of spiders.

Generally, I'm a nature lover. I've been around nature and animals all my life. As a kid when we had a spider in the house my Dad would just say "Oh, that's just George" and the darn thing became a pet for a day. I was the girl at camp that rounded up the daddy long legs and tossed them out of the tent while the rest of campers screamed and pointed at them from their bunks. It was just a spider. I thought those girls were insane.

That is until a couple of years ago. It was late. I couldn't sleep. I was in our attached garage at our last home. A HUGE brown hairy spider came running across the concrete floor straight at me. I said I was a nature lover, but I'm not crazy. I grabbed my son's shoe and gave it a whack. This is where my world changed. When I whacked that huge honkin' sucker a BILLION little baby spiders came scurrying out all over the place. Yeah, I'll pause here for a minute while you recoil from your computer screen...

Nice huh? Well, after I completely LOST IT, I gathered my senses enough to go grab a can of insecticide. I can safely surmise that there won't be another living spider in that garage for 20 years. I nuked the place.

So my gardening experience today brought back some of those butt-clenching tingly feelings. Yet I persevered and manged to get all the weeds pulled from the area with the help of the kid. While we were pulling weeds he looked at me and said "Did you hear that?" I replied "Hear what?" We paused and didn't hear anything.

Do you see where this is going?

So after carting an entire wheelbarrow full of weeds to our mountain o' rubbish, I returned to the weeded area to pick up my tools. I nearly put my eye out with that miniature hoe thingy when I saw the bleeping snake. I screamed like a school girl. The kid opened the window from inside the house and asked "What was that?" I managed to spit out, "Oh, just a snake." He said "Do you want me to come out and get it?" I responded, "Um, no that's not necessary. I'm so DONE for today."

The wheelbarrow and tools are still out there.