This one is fairly obvious. I had just graduated from nursing school and accepted my first job. I was (still am) young, independent, and I wanted to support myself and move somewhere fun and have a couple roommates. So I decided to move in with Karen (a childhood friend) and Gianluca (an Italian friend I've known for several years). We scoured St. Louis looking for apartments, houses, condos, anything that would fit our little picture of what we were looking for. Finally we found it: the perfect little house was sitting there waiting for us at 7486 Gannon Avenue in University City. We were minutes from the Loop, minutes from several major highways, and the drive the the hospital was less than 15 minutes. We moved in and got everything situated. We had a big party during Riversplash, and saw Big Head Todd and the Monsters play down under the arch. On the weekends would go into U city and have drinks, and there was plenty of good shopping around. I got very familiar with the U City Library (if you've never been, it's one of the nicer public libraries in St. Louis). The house had a fenced in yard, so Maddie was happy too. It was good until........
#10 (Worst): Discovering the house in University City was infested with brown recluse spiders.
Now, if you know me, you already know that I have an unhealthy fear of spiders. I don't think I quite qualify to say it's a phobia, but it's close. I understand they are beneficial and good for insects, etc., and so I would never want to abolish spiders completely but I don't want them anywhere near me. Ever. One time on my drive to Alton from Columbia, MO, I saw one on the inside of the car I was driving on the windshield. It just kept crawling all over the place, and I very nearly ended my own life that day on highway 70 because I could not simultaneously drive the car and try to make sure the spider didn't get me.
So you can understand my horror, then, when I was watching a movie on the couch in our brand new house in U City, and I saw something scuttling across the floor. Intuitively, I knew was it was without even being able to see it well. Now, I may be terrified of them, but I happen to know a little bit about identifying the bad kind (thanks to the cabin we have nestled in the woods in the heart of brown recluse land). But that one was scuttling so fast that I couldn't get a good look. And it's hard to get a good look anyway when (for the sake of sanity) you require at least a 10 foot distance between yourself and the spider. Anyway, I sort of stored it in my mind that this particular spider was a suspicious size, shape, and color and just left it at that. (Well, sort of. When Gianluca got home, I made him tear apart the living room to look for it, but it had escaped). Then, a few days later I was doing my makeup in the bathroom and saw another spider run down the side of the vanity and across the floor. I got a good look at that one and knew immediately what we had: brown recluse. However, I try to be logical when I can, and I know that these spiders weren't acting like a typical recluse because they weren't being reclusive. I knew if we wanted proof I would need to see that little upside down violin on the abdomen. This initiated the most terrifying mission of my life: I needed to catch the one thing in life that I fear most and get a good look at it's abdomen. Obviously, though, it would have to die first, but if we wanted to see it's abdomen we couldn't just smash it. I had already killed the bathroom spider via smashing, so I knew we would have to find another. This proved to be horrifically simple: once we started looking, they were everywhere. There were two in Karen's bedroom, one within inches of where she laid her head every night. There was one in my bedroom. There were several in the kitchen (Karen very nearly got bitten when she reached into the sink to grab a dish one morning), several on the back porch, and one in the upstairs game room. There was the one in the bathroom (R.I.P., little poisonous spider), and the one in the living room. So finding them was easy. Finding a way to kill them and leave them intact proved much more difficult. I found one on the back porch and decided to pour bleach on it. It didn't even phase this spider. I tried insect spray. Still nothing. I tried ammonia. Nothing. The thing just kept crawling around like a lunatic. Finally after several more doses of bleach, it stopped running around, but was still moving. After much waiting, it stopped running around and just laid there wiggling its soggy legs. When I was absolutely sure that it could not move positionally, I used a paper towel to scoop it up and put it in a gladware container. After I let it dry a bit, I opened the container and held my breath. There, staring me right in the face was the upside down violin. A week later, we were moving in our new apartment in South City.
I was still disturbed about the behavior of these spiders, though, so I called an exterminator and he told me that the week we saw them everywhere was unseasonably cool, and that sometimes weather changes like that make them come out into the open. So there you have it.
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