I have a love-hate relationship with most things that creep and/or crawl. I mostly hate them, but pretend to love them so that the lils don’t grow up freaking out over bugs of any size. This approach worked fairly well when the lils were younger, making sure that they thought of all the littlest creatures as “friends”. They embraced this idea, but it did mean that I could not just kill a bug when it was found in the house. Those bugs had to be saved and re-homed. Willy became the bug mover in our house, even if it meant that the bug was just tossed outside in -30°C. Everyone was happy with this arrangement (except maybe the bug).

As the lils got older and Willy started to travel more and more, I became the relocation expert. Centipedes were among my least favourite, followed closely by the spiders. We live in an old house, so we have plenty of these creatures live in the basement and the dark corners. I got very good at catching them, and disposing of them without showing my true feelings, for the most part. Woo seems to have accepted all the bugs that cross our path, but Goose is infinitely twitchier. I am sure that some of those twitches can be tied to my reactions to the various bugs. You can really blame me, though. Over the years we have had a few really cool bugs show up, but we have also had our share of pests that were giant or overwhelming in number. These things start to get to you after a while.

This year has been the year of the spider. I don’t know why, but they seem to have taken a liking to me, to our house. We had about a thousand hatch from two egg sacks in the late spring.

These stuck around, and became big garden spiders. Harmless garden spiders, but still an annoyance. Every time I walked out of the house I walked through a new web. Walking through a new web meant that I had to do the “OH MY GOD, there is a SPIDER on my face/neck/hair…” dance many times a day, much to the amusement of my neighbours, I am sure. The last thing I saw as I was leaving for the airport on moving day was this guy, who’d been around for weeks and was actually growing on me.

In moving to California, I figured that we might see scorpions if we looked really hard for them, but I wasn’t terribly worried that we would even see them. “It’s just like home,” I convinced myself, “but with more cockroaches.” Then this happened on a walk with Woo:

Despite my desire to run away, I did stop to take a picture. Tarantulas are creepy as hell, but they are also pretty cool. This one was not too big, and was walking very slowly. It looked like it had been injured, so I was fairly certain I could outrun it if it made any sudden movements. Woo was thrilled. He told me several times that this was the best day ever, and has taken to referring to that particular walking trail as ‘tarantula path’. When we were there today, we both were on the look out for more of these big furry spiders, but only one of us wanted to see one.

I didn’t sign up for this. I am afraid of what comes next.