I had another bout of reading-induced insomnia last night and so when my alarm went off at 06:00, I slapped the snooze button with a mix of despair and elation. The former for the fact today is going to be a snoozy mess and the latter because that was 06:15 Doug’s problem.

Then Kaz, in bed, asked me to get up so I could help them take care of a spider.

“It’s big,” they said.

To put this in perspective, this is a rough depiction of what happened next…

For a less silly depiction, keep these measurements in mind. There is a carafe that we use to bring water up to refill a cat fountain. I have not measured it but I would assume the top to be around 8cm wide. The spider, aka Shelob the Ancient Terror, was big enough that she maybe had 0,5cm clearance on either side when I aimed the carafe to capture her.

After summoning enough energy to actually capture and not outright kill the foul hell beast, I finally – with only one instance of the spider trying to bolt – got it in the carafe and then the spider actively leapt to the back of the carafe like she was trying to eat my hand. Sure, sure, I appreciate she was probably just going for something she could hide in, but it made me think really hard about this scene:

I grabbed an index card to act as a temporary lid and then had to semi-gently hold it down to trap the demon, who preceded to charge the lid as the obvious weakpoint in her containment.

Kaz, who has pretty notable arachnophobia, had to take point at this, um…point…because my legs are not stable enough to go down stairs while holding a paper lid to a glass carafe with the fifth horsewoman trapped inside.

Kaz got it downstairs and then set it outside by the hedges and fled the area to a minimum safe distance.

While it is not freezing here in Grimbergen, it is cold, and I realized that if the spider was unable to get out of the glass carafe then it could be in a bit of trouble and I felt bad for it. I got on enough clothes to go outside and see if I needed to tip the carafe over and it was like a scene from a horror movie where the clearly dead monster is now gone.

There was the glass carafe, empty, and the paper lid on top had been knocked over and was a few cm over right at the edge of the hedges, like it had been dragged with force, with no spider in sight. You could practically hear the John Carpenter soundtrack playing. The spider you don’t see, and all that…

I picked up the carafe, and brought it inside, a single strand of thick web on the lip of it the only sign it had been used for that purpose.

It was only around fifteen minutes later that I realized what the index card had on it and that I was going to have to go back outside and reach into the edges of a hedge bush that statistically now had more giant spiders than it had before, and had to get it.

Why?

Because this was what was on the index card…

can you figr out who this is from? I love you Kaz and Douge. you two are the best parints in the world. [then there is a heart with K+D = B and an explanation of K = Kaz, D = Douge, and B = Barbara...which maybe negates the secret love letter angle a *tad*]

…and I wasn’t going to allow her to keep it.

Anyhow, I’ll accept my Dad of the Year Award, now.

BONUS HORROR MOVIE VIBE: Right as I was finishing this post I reached up to brush at the side of my face where I could feel something, and there was a long, thick strand of spiderweb in my hair, because I guess I had brushed my head against the hedges.

Once again, cue John Carpenter music.