I'm not scared of bugs and creepy crawlies. Were I Queen and High Empress of my entire domain, we would be on live and let live terms with the bugs. Well, the good bugs. I had no problems with the destruction of the earwig plauge we had after the flooding in CF, or in killing the hoardes of Japanese beetles parading as ladybugs except that these things bite and stink. But, for the most part, flies, moths, house spiders, etc. should be allowed to co-habitate in moderation and if they promise to stay out of the kitchen. Especially when we were living in a basement, you're bound to have some pests, why go to the trouble getting rid of all of them?
The Boy, however, is terrified of bugs. How he managed to live in a basement for ten years of his life, I don't understand, but he and the insect world are not good friends. So, if left to his own devices, he will smash things. It is up to me to deposit the poor things outside, or they will die a hideous squashy death.
There are some things, however, that I do draw the line about carrying outside. While I do not mind smallish spiders in their little webs, house spiders, celler spiders, etc., anything with a leg span bigger than about a quarter I am not willing to deal with. They have a tendency to be really fast and also bitey.
Years of camping with wolf spiders, ohh, what? You've never seen a wolf spider? You may Google them yourself. Somewhere I have an undeveloped point and shoot with a bunch of them on tent walls and next to pop cans for size reference, the Google pictures don't give good reference. To give sort of an idea, these are generally as big as (if not bigger than) your palm. When they run along a canvas tent ceiling, you can hear the pitter patter of their little spider feet.
Girls literally scream their heads off when they see them, and frankly, I wouldn't want to sleep in the same room as one either. So, we would get the broom and spend twenty minutes trying to sweep them off the ceiling and outside. True to form, I would never ever kill the things, though I know of counsellors who did, and all it would do would make a big sticky mess. (Generally on the tent floor, because that's where they'd smash them. Because if I were a camper I wouldn't be terrified of the dead spider bits on the floor, no way.)
This is my experience with spiders. I don't want to deal with them when they're big. So, cue the orb spider that managed to get into the house the other day. Orb spiders are the biggish ones that build webs across sidewalks and in-between parked cars in the late summer early fall. We have reached that time of year. I've never seen them get into the house before. This one chose to build right under the ceiling in the hallway. The ceiling is pitched, but I can't touch it at the lowest point, which is still higher than a the peak on a tent. There was no way this thing was coming down by my hands.
Concerned first of all that it wasn't an orb spider (I'd never known them to build inside, and it wasn't making its classic X in the web.) I looked up poisonous varieties which I know like to live in the ceilings of houses. Discovering it was, yes, an orb spider. I told The Boy I couldn't do anything about the guest in the hallway, but he was welcome to try something. I forgot he's a murderer. I figured all he'd do would be to take the broom and sweep it up and outside.
In retrospect, I probably could've done it, but it was really early in the morning and if I chanced to think poisonous spider anyway, I obviously wasn't thinking clearly. He, however, chose to use his shoes. I shouldn't have been so angry, but I really hate it when people kill things out of fear. Just like I used to explain to the campers, when you kill something out of fear, you are doing the same thing that all narrow-minded people who start wars do. Insect holocaust is unnecessary.
I really ought, though, to more terrified of all things creepy and crawly. When I was eleven a bumblebee flew into my eye and stung me milimeters away from the eyeball. My whole eye swelled up about the size of a golf ball, and closed. It's a good thing it was summer because if I'd gone to school like that, I wonder how easily they'd've believed it was the result of a bee sting. Thing is, if I had had any sort of allergy (beyond the swelling), they figure I could've ended up blind even though it wasn't right in my eye.
How did I happen to get stung that close to the eyeball? My brother thought that the best way to get rid of bees was to try to hit them out of the sky with a big stick. (My brother, in later years, would do this to lightning bugs because, I don't know, he's a hopeless murderous bastard.) Since we were standing in the little walkway o' yard between our house and the neighbour's (maybe four feet wide), the bee decided to head straight for me, in a rage, and it turned out he was flying at eye level. It just felt fuzzy (like pompoms) until it stung me. That was the second (and last) time I've been stung. To this day I practice and advocate The Freeze Method, where you pretend you're just another pretty flower and hope the thing goes away. Running, flailing and screaming are sure fire ways to get yourself stung.
I have a bat incident too. This one also takes place at camp, but years before, while I was still a camper, probably in fourth grade, the summer before the bumblebee. It was after the All Camp Campfire, which means it was maybe nine o clock or thereabouts, but we were doing our own campfire with S'mores afterwards, or maybe a night swim, I don't quite remember. I do know it was relatively dark, but I was stopping in my tent really quick to get something. One of my tent-mates had been particularly annoying the whole way back, pinching everybody was her hobby, I think. So when I felt something that felt like a hand on the back of my head, I told her to cut it out. She announced from outside that she was not in the tent, and didn't have her hand on my head. I thought, well, maybe it's a grasshopper or something, and brushed my hand back over my head. I touched something huge that fell to the ground and into the beam from my flahslight. It was, pretty obviously, a bat. I called to the girl that it was a bat, who (outside) began screaming. That sent the counselors over and I relayed that I'd had a bat in my hair, but it was gone now.
They calmed down the other girl, and tried to work out if the bat had bit me. I said if it had bit me, I would've felt it, and I was fine. They couldn't understand why I wasn't in hysterics like the my tentmate (I'm sure inside THEY both were). It made sense to me- we'd been to camp together before and SHE was terrified of daddy long legs and got homesick and claimed she was allergic to anything that made her momentarily uncomfortable. Why would I want to be like that? She wasn't any fun to be around like that. We were good friends, because I'd discovered by then that most girls were that way at least part of the time, you just had to put up with them.
I'm also amazed that I have never ever gotten poison ivy. I should have, by now. With poison ivy, you know, it's the second time you show the rash. The first time, nothing happens. That's why that Mythbusters episode with the poison ivy, where they test everyone once and they don't get it bugs me. Someone didn't do the appropriate research there. I guess they do test Grant twice (so he probably is immune), but, really, exposing all kinds of people to poison ivy once, to ensure they get it the next time, even in the name of science is incredibly stupid.
To sum up, embrace the creepy crawlies of the world as often as possible. Thoughtless murder is Hilter-esque and wrong, except in the case of plauges, a true plauge is all right. However, I've read that CitriSol will keep spiders away from a home, so I think we'll be buying some to spray around the foundations and in the eaves. Preventing murder is a much better solution.