It's all relative really...

I actually had another post in mind that I started working on.  A post in response to Marcia's post and where she emailed me and asked if I would do a blog entry on it.  So I'm working on it! 

This morning I didn't have the best start to my day.  When you are already running late and then have to sort out a crisis (of sorts)...  Not the way I wanted to start my Monday, but anway.

Just as we were about to leave to drop Bianca off at school, the kids discovered a young bird (well I don't really know much about birds, but it looks young to me...) sitting on our outside steps.  How it was even still alive with our cats around I have no idea, but there it was.  So we stood there wondering what on earth we were supposed to do.  Shouted at the cats that looked like they had some plans of their own and then finally managed to get them back into the house with the cat door locked.  Prince Charming was so not impressed with me and loudly objected at the injustice of it all.  Right now the little bird is sitting under the tree and I have no idea at which point it would be fine to let the cats out again.  I know that if I let them out now or if they slip out as we leave through the front door, they'll go straight for the bird.

It is all relative really... This morning I realised once again that in my world, this is rather small:

But this (in my world) is big!

Especially when Terence is not here to sort it out and both Bianca and I are too scared to even look at it and each time it moves, we run away screaming.  I nearly had a heart attack when finally I managed to get some water in a container, plucked up the courage and tried to flush it down the drain, but the water came down with such force that it got flushed right out of the sink... and sat there on the top of the bench. So not the ideal situation!  Where is Terence when I need him? I mean this is one of the reasons us women keep men so that we don't have to deal with freaky creatures... 

I absolutely hate spiders.  I'm scared of them and they freak me out so much so that I can't even stand to look at it.  Even putting this image on my blog fills me with dread.  If I was somebody else watching me as I edited the photo to make it smaller, I would have laughed my head off watching myself.

Brings back vivid memories of the time we lived in our rental home in Khandallah and we had a huge spider problem (like in finding 12 really big ones crawling around the inside of the house in the first 2 weeks).  It was like living in my worst nightmare ever!  I became so good at spotting them that I could see them in the darkest little corners.  And these spiders were really big.  Like in if they were dead and all curled up with their legs pulled in, they would probably be about 10cm long or something like that.  I should have know the very first day really, we arrived after a very long drive from Auckland (we did our own move) and I went to the upstairs toilet.  I noticed something black and round in the one corner.  Looked a bit like a flower shaped fridge magnet.  I wondered why it was there because that's a silly place for a fridge magnet, and then when I looked closer I noticed it was a spider - all dead and curled up.  Didn't know that that was going to be a sign of things to come...

This house was really big.  It had 6 bedrooms, a really big sunroom, lounge, kitchen, dining room and 2 bathrooms.  We didn't intend to get such a big house, but I only had 3 options at the time - a house in Houghton Bay with 40 steps from your garage to your front door (not ideal with a 2 year old at the time), a smaller house literally about 20 steps to the Khandallah station and right next to a dairy (didn't feel ideal) and then this one.  And this one wasn't much more expensive than the other ones, so we took it.  It had the most amazing view of the harbour, was right up on the hill and oh so quiet.  And if it wasn't for the dreaded spiders could have continued living there. 

The front of the house.  See we do get blue skies here in New Zealand...  The room on the right of the picture (at the top) is the sun room.  The lounge and kitchen were both as long as this room and the dining room is at the windows in the middle (the top).  The bottom had 4 bedrooms, shower / toilet.

Our view from our house.

The lounge.  Through the front left is the dining room that we turned into a play room and through the right you get the stairs, 2 bedrooms and a bathroom.

The kitchen.  There was enough space for our dining room table and chairs also.

 

 The view from the kitchen through the lounge and sun room.

 

Now with this house we mostly only used the top.  So as you come through the front door, you had a big room on your left (which looked like you could have used it as a study also), and then to the right there was a room, a long passage way with 2 other rooms and a bathroom with toilet and shower.  Then you take the stairs up and there were 2 bedrooms (the master and one smaller), a bathroom with bath, shower and toilet, the kitchen, lounge, a sun room and then what I assume a formal dining room (we didn't use it as a dining room, we turned it into a play room for Bianca).  
 
The only thing we really used at downstairs was the shower (the shower downstairs was better than the one upstairs).  So every morning I would go downstairs, carefully looking in each little corner just in case a spider was there.  I would glance down the hallway (looking at the floor as well as the ceiling (because you never know if something will jump on you...).  I would then stick my head into the bathroom carefully looking against all the walls, the ceiling, the corners just to make sure I don't have some visitors with me and then I would shower.  Afterwards I would rush upstairs again.  Quite the ritual I tell you...

One morning I did the same, checking as I go and as I got to the bathroom I noticed this big black spider with its long, thin, legs quietly sitting on the wall in the bathroom (where I'm supposed to shower...).  That was the quickest I ran back upstairs and sent Terence to go and sort it out... 

Another time we were watching a movie.  Grease with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.  One of my favourites. I felt cold and asked Terence to go and get me a blanket.  He went downstairs and got a blanket from there and I looked at him and said I wasn't keen because it came from downstairs and that was where most of the spiders seemed to be.  He shook it all out and then passed it to me.  So there we were watching the movie and then in the one scene, the "Beauty school dropout" scene (for those of you who saw the movie) just at that moment a huge spider crawled from where the blanket was touching the floor.  That was the quickest I ever got up and out of my clothes feeling all freaked out not knowing if this spider was actually in the blanket, sitting on me or what.  Terence collapsed on the floor laughing and just for that - I made him get rid of the big spider.  Took me a long time before I could use that particular blanket again.

I can handle many things, but living with big spiders in my house - not so much...