Oh good God people! Stop it! I'm not scared of spiders or creepy crawlies, although I won't pick them up by hand I'm not a LUNATIC!
I am very much enjoying (and sympathising of course!) this thread as I sit and can't control my laughter as I sit and wait for a Dr's appointment and read about EllenD leaping about at work!
I have a battery powered electric racket that I use to kill flies. One time I was running around in the buff chasing after a fly for so long, I forgot to notice it had turned dark outside. And my blinds were still up.
YES! THIS! $9.99 AT WALMART! I LOVE THESE THINGS, I HAVE 3 OF THEM! (one for each floor of my house)
Well that explains a lot, Christa is from the Netherlands. I'd probably even be a bit more mellow about insects too if I lived in the Netherlands. :54:
And Dubias? Really Christa, really? It had to be Dubias didn't it...Someone once told me that I should "Start a Dubia colony because it pays for itself after a year". Yeah, that's okay, I'd declare bankruptcy before I would ever "start a freaking colony" of cockroaches. "But they don't fly" she says. "They look like little pill bugs and not cockroaches really" I was told....They have legs, right? They can move, right? They multiply at the speed of sound, right? Did I mention that I have to use Tweezers to feed my Beardie her wax worms? And I love to trout fish, which becomes extremely trying for anyone who is with me, because it takes me up to 20 minutes just to get a wax worm on the hook. I quite literally spent a fortune on fly-fishing equipment and then paid for lessons to learn how to fly-fish so that I didn't have to worry about live bait.
You want a story you can laugh at? Okay, here's one that usually makes people cry, even though i'm still in therapy for it 20 years later. Oh the humanity.
My high school was old and had never been renovated (still to this day 20 years later, and it was the same way when my mom and dad graduated from it back in the early 70's). I played softball and soccer, and so I had a permanently assigned locker in the girls locker-room, which was down in the basement of the high school. We used the same locker-room for phys-ed classes, and one morning my senior year I had phys-ed class. After class we were all in the locker-room getting changed into our street clothes again, and just as I had put my jeans on, a friend started shrieking something about "What the hell is that? Look at it!"...I looked down on the cement floor, and there was this, well, "creature", that had actually crawled right out of between the lockers (they were built-into the old, decrepit, cement walls) and was crawling across the floor towards us. I still to this day don't know what it was, it's a mystery. We're all pretty sure that it was some kind of insect that had become genetically mutated over the decades of living in the asbestos and lead pipes of the high-school. It looked like a HUGE millipede/centipede or even a caterpillar from the depths of hell, it was just MASSIVE, probably 3"-4" long, was brightly multi-colored, like a parrot actually, bright blue, yellow, green, red, orange, etc., and it had these "spikes" coming out all over his body. And he was hauling-ass, that mutant bug could move! So while everyone in the locker-room was horrified by this thing, even the people who didn't mind insects were really disturbed by it, I was quite honestly having chest pains, shortness of breath, and could have actually had a small mini-stroke without really knowing it. I didn't even have my shoes on yet, just my shirt and I had just pulled my jeans on when the screaming started, and this is key to what happened next. So as I was pulling up my jeans I heard the screaming, turned around to see this horror-movie-prop of an insect crawling towards me, and then automatically "Fight-or-Flight" took over, i had no control over my body at all, my brain just told my body "FLIGHT!!!", and I just turned around and slammed face-first right into the row of lockers behind me...SPLAT! Now as if that wasn't bad enough, remember that I was pulling my jeans up when this happened, right? Well, somehow when I hit the lockers I was still pulling the zipper up on my jeans, and when I took-off and ran right into the lockers behind me (about 1 foot behind me, lol), somehow I managed to zip my, uh, "skin", into the zipper on my jeans....:02: Let's just say that if I was a guy, I would have partially castrated myself...So then I'm like in a daze, I cut my lip on the lockers, and I'm kind of crumpled into a disheveled ball at the bottom of the lockers, and I realize that I have blood all over my hand. So I'm trying to figure out what was bleeding
mad
, when someone yelled "Ellen, that nasty-ass bug is crawling on your f***ing leg!" So I look down, see this "thing" crawling over my shin, I kick my leg up in the air to get it off, the "thing" goes flying in the air and lands on this girl's head and gets stuck in her mid-90's hair full of hairspray, she had a complete and total panic attack and was just flailing her arms everywhere, screaming at the top of her lungs while people were trying to get her to hold still so that they could try to get this "thing" out of her hair, and I had actually kicked one of the huge, wooden benches that were built-into the floor of the locker-room in-between the lockers and thought I had broken my leg. But i still had this little "issue" going on with my, uh, zipper, so while this girl is yelling for me to help get the "thing" out of her hair, I guess my brain decided "FLIGHT" again, it was just time to get the hell out of the locker room, and I went running up the stairs and into the gym with no socks, no shoes, my jeans hanging open and unzipped/unbuttoned, with more blood than I realized running down my leg/crotch area. Finally the female gym teacher decided she should probably go and see what was going on in the locker-room, that's how well supervised we were in the 90's, lol, we could have been setting the school on fire and no one would have bothered to see where the smoke was coming from...
I ended up having to leave school for the day because I had blood all over my pants and then also all over my face and my shirt from my lip bleeding...It looked like I had gotten in a fight while getting my period all at the same time...The school nurse was trying to help I guess, they made me go to the freaking school nurse over this, carrying my boots with my socks shoved inside them, with my jeans unzipped and unbuttoned, walking through the school in my bare-feet covered in blood, with people inside the classrooms doing double-takes as they glanced out into the hallway and saw me, then the laughing would start, lol. The school nurse kept saying "I can't help you if you won't let me see it!", and me swatting her hands away yelling "I don't need your help and you don't need to see it!" And of course my mom was the elementary art teacher for my school district, so they called her, she had to get a substitute and then come up to the high-school while I spent a good 45 minutes trying to free my "skin" from my zipper with the school nurse coming at me with gauze and cotton balls...Then I see my mom walk into the outer office and all I want is OUT OF THERE, so I grab my shoes and socks and bolt out into the office, my mom sees me and say "What the hell Ellen?" and I just said "Let's go!" and bolted up the hall and outside to her car...She got into the car, shut the door, put her seatbelt on, started the car, and I swear not a single sound was uttered in that car the entire way home. Not.One.Word. When we pulled in the driveway I ran inside and up to my room, shut and locked the door, with my mom outside of it going "El, um, are you, um, I'll be downstairs, um, yeah, okay". After about an hour or so of trying to get myself free from the zipper without tearing more, uh, "skin", I just had to bite the bullet. I walked downstairs into the kitchen, there was my mom drinking a cup of coffee, trying so hard to contain her ruckus laughter, and I swear I'm not making this up, before I could say anything, our African Gray says "Oh no El! Oh no!" After telling him to shut-up I just said "I'm stuck in my zipper and I need help", staring at the floor when I said it to her. It took her all of 10 seconds to free me, it hurt like a mother but I was free. I went and changed into sweats, cleaned myself up, and then went downstairs to get a drink. My mom is quiet but staring at me, and finally I couldn't take it anymore and I said "It was a huge, nasty bug, I don't know what it was, but it was huge and awful and it got stuck in Barnett's hair". That was enough to explain things to my mom, she was well aware of my primal-fear of insects, and that was the end of it...Later I found out that Barnett had to actually sit there for a good 15 minutes while multiple people dug through her hair trying to free this "thing", and when I asked what happened to it, I was told that once they got it out of her hair it fell on the locker-room floor and then went running full-speed and crawled right back in-between the lockers again.
To this day we don't know what it was, where it came from, or where it went. It's our Bigfoot. Our Loch-Ness. Our Mothman.
