Let me begin by saying this is NOT the spider I found crawling out of my shoe last night. No. The one I found was black and fast and leggy and THIS big. With fangs and such. If a diamond spider had wriggled willy nilly across my floor, I’d have killed myself to snatch it. I wasn’t so inclined last night when the creepy one came calling. And it haunted me all night, because an unkilled spider in the bedroom is the stuff nightmares are made of.
I know there are some who understand spiders to be Ecologically Important and such, but I’m not one of them. In England, it appears folks go to great and expensive lengths to catch and release their little in-house arachnid friends. Can you imagine? This little contraption from Eurocosm swears spiders will be snagged unharmed so they can then be released out into the garden where they become Quite Beneficial.I’ll admit the spider that climbed out of my shoe and into God Knows Where last night wasn’t a tarantula. It was big, though, and alive and crawled hastily under my antique dressing table. Like any good Southern woman, I blindly blasted hairspray under there. Laugh all you want, but it works. I’ve killed many a creeping and flying varmit with aerosol hairspray and they drop in their tracks, as I’m assuming this one did.
On a more positive and self-promoting note, there’s a little photography contest going on right now called Capture Arkansas. The winners are chosen in a variety of ways, but mostly by viewer votes and I’ve decided to play. Winning photos will be published in a coffee-table book, so you’ve got to take a minute or two to vote and look at some of the pictures. Anyone out there unfamiliar with Arkansas will find this an interesting visual vacation. Those of you from around here need to throw your own pictures onto the heap. It’s just good clean fun, folks.
You can either click on one of the photos over <——there, or click HERE to vote and admire. Note: my girlfriends from the Branson Trip have no idea I’ve done this, so sshhhhhhh…
No Telling 
Hairspray is way better than any insect spray!! People (by people I mean David) laugh at me but I care not cause it works!We have a situation where Max is obsessed with spiders, so we can’t k-i-l-l (had to spell cause he’s reading over my shoulder and he can read what I just spelled so it was pointless) them in his presence without some serious freaking out! We (by we I mean David) gets to scoop them up and return them outdoors. He loves that.Now, off to vote for your pictures!!
You know, one of the only memories I have of actually shooting a gun and hitting something was when I spotted a huge garden spider about three inches long perched on its spiderweb in the barn doorway I had to go through. I asked for permission, and I was allowed to take the .22 shotgun and shoot the damn thing down.That’s how freaking big the spiders get. You have to use a firearm, and you have to be at a distance. Otherwise, they’ll do exactly what you said they will – wrestle you for your weapon and clobber you with it.
Couldnt have been too big…I didn’t hear any screams or flip-flops hitting the wall…
Candace, the only thing I REALLY need in this house is a big pink can of AquaNet. These fancy hairsprays – while giving a light, breezy hold – just don’t seem to have the same instant bug-killing success as the old stuff.Emily, I think it crawled in your room. Sweet dreams.W.E.B. – this is precisely why I cannot have guns in the house. They’d be ill-used on bugs. Maybe I should write up the story about when I emptied my ex-the-undecover-cop’s automatic rifle into the back yard and shot off most of the railing. I was having a moment. Just like yours.
I’m one of the weird British people who actually likes spiders. i was even excited to find five harvest spiders hiding out behind the buttercups in my pathway. And when I find a white and red striped spider i was straight onto Google to find out what it was….
Two years ago I found three black widows dangling in the corners of my garage and I decided it was a sign of the Apocalypse.Brits must have much nicer spiders.