SPIDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG SPIDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When I got to the beach, my friend, who was already there because the wench is retired and I hate her for that, was practically performing the pee pee dance in her desire to tell me what had happened to her the day before. She knows completely about my …… “issues” with spiders and to be perfectly honest, she isn’t far from my level of phobia herself.

I’ll refer to her as J as opposed to “that ridiculously short woman friend of mine.” Because she IS short – we’re talking barely over 5 feet tall short. As I tell this story, remember also that this woman, whose legs are all of maybe 2 feet long, drives a Jeep Liberty. She has to get a running start to jump into the thing.

She was preparing to leave the campground and do a little shopping since she also has skin the color of a marshmallow and avoids the sun like a white hot plague, and had just opened the door to the Jeep and hopped in, started it up and got ready to back out. She said she couldn’t explain it but somehow she just knew something had jumped on her. She couldn’t feel it. She heard it. Always a bad sign.

She froze, looked down and perched on the crotch of her pants was one of those big, hairy, boxy, horrifying wolf spider things. She said it was absolutely enormous. She stopped breathing, thanked God for leather seats, slowly reached over to open the car door, slowly slid from the driver’s seat and then launched herself out of the car while whacking at her crotch to get the evil beast off. She stood there with her head down, trying not to pass out when she noticed something.

The car was moving. With no one in it.

In her panic, she forgot she’d already put the car in reverse. She reached for the door (like THAT was gonna stop it) and hopped on one foot, trying to get her other foot on the brake. She did, but because she's so damned short and car was moving, she couldn’t get any pressure on the brake. About 6 inches before the Jeep rolled into the front of their motor home, she managed to wrench herself into the car and slam both feet down on the brake and throw it into park.

She swears to God that she’d have managed to stop the car sooner if not for the fact that, even in the face of ramming their new Jeep into the front of their rather amazing motor home, she was still looking around for that damned spider.

I fully appreciate the conflicting priorities. And you will fully appreciate the fact that I didn't go anywhere with her in that spider warren for the entire time I was with them. I would have preferred to be strapped to the luggage rack than suddenly find myself forced to decide between riding with a spider on my shoulder and throwing myself from a moving vehicle.

I'm figuring I'd bounce.