My routine doesn't vary much. Except on Thursdays, of course. It's the last "work" day of the week for me, I get to sleep in as late as I want and knock off early if I want to. I always look forward to Thursday precisely because it is the one day out of the week I can sleep as late as I want, unaffected by my boyfriend's lack of need for sleep. Seriously... who gets five hours and is perfectly fine? Of course, because I get to sleep in as late as I want, I usually end up waking up earlier than other days. Be it the dogs walking around, people making too much noise in the area, or I simply can't sleep anymore, it never works out for me.

This morning was no exception to the "I get to sleep in but I won't" rule. Truth be told, I'm a little grumpy about it. I don't have anything against mornings, but I'm usually pretty grumpy for about 10 minutes after I wake up. (I don't drink coffee, either.)

So I get up and do my thing like I usually do. You know, bathroom, tea, turn my computer on. I walk into the kitchen to get said tea and what happens? I almost step on this big, brown, furry asshole spider. I don't mean like a tarantula. I mean a normal spider. I shriek. I jump away, and I start crying. Meanwhile, this shithead piece of crap freaky spider just meanders along the kitchen floor. Entirely unperturbed. Entirely normal. Just fine. So I think.... "Okay, Girl, get your crap together. This is a big spider here. You have dogs. What if he's poisonous? What if he's a murderous bastard that looks normal at first but then comes back to kill you and everyone you've ever known later? He has to die. Burn the house down."

Spoiler alert: I didn't burn the house down. I did what any sane, rational woman would do. I grabbed a flip flop and I chucked it at the thing thinking... well, it's almost winter and I won't be wearing it again until next year. Maybe that's enough time to forget the carnage on this beloved shoe? I missed the stupid spider. And now he's mad. He (could be a she, but I think it's a male because... well, because...) crawls and hides behind my dog's bowl. Oh. Hell. Naw. I can't have this. I have to actually feed my dog, right? Of course, I do. Don't be stupid, me.

Meanwhile, I'm crying and whimpering like a baby and cursing the world. So I grab one of those long bar, florescent lights... you know what I'm talking about? The kind they use in lights in all the bad high school sex-ed films. I carefully pull the bowl away from the spider, after making sure he's not actually on the bowl. I can hear the glass making "I might shatter" noises, but I manage. The spider is now curled up between the floor and the wall. So what do I do? I scream at it, but not in a normal way. I don't say "SCREW YOU, SPIDER!" Because he'd understand me and still come back and kill me and everyone I've ever known. He's now the mafia spider. I believe he carries body bags in his trunk with the sole purpose of throwing the bodies (weighted down, naturally, he's not an animal) into the bay.

I throw another shoe at him. Miss entirely. I can't walk past the spider now to retrieve the shoe. Fortunately, we are humans and our shoes come in pairs. But now I'm too afraid to move because I've just realized he could be a jumping spider and attack me from across the room if he saw fit to do so. I believe I called my mother at some point. What I expected her to do, I still have no idea. She lives almost an hour away.

So I stand there for a few minutes, staring this spider down while trying not to be too obvious about it. And I'm blaming my boyfriend of two and a half years for this. It is his fault. He is never home when this crap happens. Okay, once he was home. There have been (I think) four spiders of actual, freak-me-out size that he hasn't been home for. Oh and two snakes. One slithering along the outside of the house while I was trapped outside and on the phone with my boss, crying in terror. The other was actually inside of the house. My friend came out and killed that one for me. Otherwise, I would've left the house and never come back. I'm nothing if not logical.

So at some point I threw a couple more shoes at the spider. Now he's really at a point where he's fed up with my bad aim. Who can throw shoes well, anyway? If it were a baseball or a softball, I could've killed him with ease. But Mama always said, don't throw balls in the house. (Tee hee. Get over it. I'm immature every once in awhile.)

The spider starts crawling away and hides in the laundry room. I have no need to go in there. I consider briefly trapping him under a bowl until the boyfriend can get home but think better of it when I start approaching the demon spawn.

The moral of the story here is... spiders will kill you whether you leave them alone or not. Hole up in your room, watch the door with a 12 gauge, and don't move. There is no moral of the story. Spiders suck. Meanwhile, as I'm writing this... the spider is still alive. Somewhere. Plotting his revenge.

UPDATE: The spider came back. I'm convinced he came back for me because he was running straight for my computer chair. Fortunately, he didn't make his reappearance until late in the evening when the boyfriend was home. He killed it. The true moral of the story is: when a big, creepy spider dies, don't wonder if it's the same one or a different big, creepy spider.