Not An Itsy Bitsy Spider - Another Good Reason to Stay Out of the Kitchen

We’ve been having adventures. Eight legged adventures. I was eating some grapes the other day. Not just plain regular grapes, but delicious, juicy organic grapes when I discovered a very large spider was in my bowl! I rocketed out of the chair and did some sort of terrified 10 yard dash to the sink with the spider bowl. Fortunately spidey stayed in the bowl just long enough for me to flush him down the kitchen drain.

This was a rather ugly spider. It was black and had a large round bulbous body. It was very big, too. From what I can tell from the spider pictures I forced myself to look at on the internet, it was a black house spider. They are venomous. Great. Apparently the bite is poisonous but not lethal. The bite causes muscular pains (I have those daily), vomiting (so far no to that), headaches (okay, I have those), and giddiness. Giddiness? Are you kidding? Who gets giddy from a spider bite?

The experience might not have been so bad if organic grapes weren’t more expensive than regular grapes. And none of this might have been so bad if my grandparents weren’t raising my parents during the depression. They were the original earth mothers, those people. I know for a fact my grandmother Emma saved every glass jar she ever had and recycled it for decades.

If one of her jars could talk, it would have said, four score and seven years ago I was a new jar. Okay, maybe, just maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. After all, Grammy Emma only lived for four score and nine years. Never mind, I take it back. My great grandparents were frugal (aka tight fisted) German folks and my Grammy Emma probably was saving jars starting when she was two.

Grammy Emma used and reused jars for canning. When the lids rusted off she did actually buy replacement lids to the extent she could can the entire garden produce grown in Knox county Nebraska. I remember picking tomatoes, peeling tomatoes and I remember the bugs, too. They were huge and creepy and ate big holes in the tomatoes. Grammy would curse them, stomp on them and then carefully cute around the hole eaten by the bug. I’m very sure the bugs were a large part of the reason why I wouldn’t eat tomatoes as a kid. Besides, what kid eats tomatoes anyway?

Tomatoes are the kind of thing you acquire a taste for. Especially vine ripened tomatoes grown from your own plant. My brother’s dog had a taste for their home grown tomatoes. This dog was a dumb dumb. It was supposed to be a hunting dog. Instead, it was the most pampered princess ever. First of all, it was named “Madison”. That’s a clear sign that the dog will never live to see a day in the field hunting birdies. A dog with a name like that might as well have a hand tooled collar that says “I’m a surrogate child – spoil me”.

Yes, my brother and his wife had kids. I just can’t remember which came first. Niece number two or the no brain purebred dumb dumb.

I have earned the right to make fun of my brother’s dog. We have had way dumber dogs over the years. Every one of them was a basset hound. Basset hounds are short on brains as well as legs. But they make excellent couch potatoes and are fantastic pets. Further, they don’t eat tomatoes.  Okay, they are probably too lazy to eat tomatoes.  Heck, they are too lazy to fetch a stick.  This is our first basset hound, Radar, examining a stick from a comfy place laying down in the grass.

Back to my brother’s dog. I can’t remember whether she demonstrated her affinity for eating furniture first, or the tomatoes. I think they might have happened around the same time. I distinctly remember her eating the arm of their couch. That might be when they chucked her outside. Being a purebred, she was destined to have too much energy to be a house dog. So somehow she wandered over to the garden and the rest is a big vet bill. Although, as I recall, it wasn’t the tomatoes themselves that were toxic, it was the leaves and stem of the plant.

Tomato plants contain oxalates. Oxalates are organic acids. Oxalates aren’t necessarily always bad. Many fruits contain oxalates and our bodies need them. In fact, our human bodies convert vitamin C into oxalates. The bad side of oxalates is that form sharp pointy acid crystals. They bind to calcium and iron. When they bind to calcium, they can form kidney stones. When they bind with iron they prevent iron from being absorbed in the bloodstream (remember the commercials for iron poor blood?).

The thing is, my brother and I grew up with dogs and tomato plants. Neither of my parents’ dogs ever bothered their tomato plants. This is because my mother ruined my dad’s hunting dog, too. It at least had a dog type name – Rags. Actually, Madison was the same kind of dog as Rags. This had to be a bad omen from the start.

Rags was the name the breeder gave to the dog and my dad kept the name. Rags actually did go hunting a few times. Rags was a virtually worthless hunting dog. She got car sick and ate all the donuts in the car. Apparently, hunting trips with my dad and brother meant taking thermoses of hot coffee and stopping for donuts. Actually, Rags hunting career was over before it ever started. Great hunting dogs are made by great trainers. Great trainers have a plan, routine practice, and patience.

My dad was excellent at planning. He would plan things for years. He enjoyed planning so much and was so good at planning that he often never got past the planning stage. My dad had several routines but practice wasn’t one of them. When it comes to patience, that’s another story. On a scale of one to ten with one being the absolute lowest and ten being the highest, my dad had zero patience.

Rags quickly became a house puppy and spent her younger days chasing my mother’s dust mop and her older days being mostly flatulent. But, the thing is, my dad had a huge garden. After all, he and my mother were children of the depression and my mother had all those canning jars from my grandmother.

So their entire back yard was a virtual urban produce farm. They planted enough tomato plants to feed all of Nebraska as well as a few developing nations. I also recall broccoli, cauliflower and onions.

Back to the tomatoes. Old flatulent Rags spent plenty of time out fertilizing the food producing forest my dad erected every year. But not once did she eat a tomato or a tomato plant. The ASPCA warns about tomato plants and dogs on their website at www.aspca.org. Eating a tomato plant can cause a dog to have gastric distress, confusion, weakness and a slow heart rate. I think my brother’s dog got diarrhea which was followed by a $400 vet bill.

That’s four hundred 1980 dollars. Heck, in this millennium, four hundred 1980 dollars are like at least two thousand eight hundred dog dollars today, aren’t they? So, basically, they had so much money invested in old dumb Madison that they had to keep her. And I don’t think she ever hunted a day in her life. At least not in sporting goods terms.

Madison was actually pretty good at indoor hunting. Nothing much edible was safe. Rags was the same way. Onetime Rags made off with and consumed a nicely roasted unlucky ducky in its entirety. Only some slobber remained.  Basset hounds, it is true, have plenty of slobber.  This is Radar's son, Rambo.  He was one of our favorite basset hounds.

Back to the spider and the grapes. I despise anything with more than four legs. I cannot bring myself to eat food on which some disease bearing multi-legged creature has landed. I just cannot eat food outdoors if flies are nearby. After all, they’ve most recently been on rotting decomposing organic matter procreating future disgusting wiggly nasty things that will become more flies. If you own dogs, this means flies spend their time buzzing around dog poop and have it all over their feet. So I cannot eat food they’ve walked around on because their feet are not clean. This goes for spiders.

But the grapes were organic, really good and healthier than pesticide coated regular grapes. This was a dilemma – to save or not save the grapes. Unfortunately I knew that no matter how many times I washed the grapes, I would see big hairy legs walking on them. End of appetite. The spider apparently knew this. I think it had a grudge about being washed down the sink.

I think this because it came back to haunt me. Later in the day, I walked past the sink. I might have been rethinking the possibility of saving the organic grapes. Then I saw IT. There, in the sink was the same big hairy round back black house spider. If there is a Guiness Book of World Records category for the amount of time needed to turn on a kitchen faucet, my name heads it up, especially if there is a subcategory for doing it while screaming bloody murder at unhuman decibles. The spider went down the garbage disposal drain nicely, minus one leg that was sticking to the sink.

Had I been thinking more clearly at this moment, I am positive I would made sure that I ran the garbage disposal for four or five hours while boiling water in every pot we own and pouring it down the drain for insurance. But those depression era thoughts about wasting grapes were haunting me. Not enough to wash the grapes. But enough to make sure the garbage bag containing the grapes was tied securely, taken outside, tossed in the garbage can and that the garbage can was moved a few more feet from the house. Just to make sure the spider from hell that wouldn’t die didn’t have any more friends hanging around the grapes.

Having to fight off the same spider twice in one day is bad enough to give me a serious case of the heebie jeebies. But this spider simply would not die. A few hours later I was thinking about what to make for dinner because my husband would be home soon. Pat rides his bike to work while I work at home. He has a ten mile commute. I have a few feet. Making dinner translates into “what do we have that I can heat up?” I may be the grand daughter of the jar saving Grammy Emma but I was liberated from the kitchen somewhere along the way, possibly as an embryo.

I think it’s a good thing, actually. Grammy Emma was my mother’s mother and a great cook. My mother was a great cook. But they are both gone. My father’s mother, Grandma Thelma, was reportedly not such a great cook. She lived well beyond both my mother and my Grammy Emma. Her mother, Grandma Randolph, or “Grandolph” as we called her, lived to be 103. I don’t know about her cooking skills but it would seem that cooking is a bad idea and their longevity seems to prove it.  I think it also proves that my dad was skinny for a reason.  But then, so is my husband.

So in moving the ten feet from my dining room ‘office with a view’ to the kitchen to rummage for leftovers or to decide what cans to open, I noticed movement in the sink – again. Again, it was the spider. It just would not die! It had climbed back out of the sink. I know it was the same round bodied very large black house spider – because it only had 7 legs. EW!

Three was not a charm. This meant war. After all, I had to throw a perfectly edible bunch of delicious organic grapes away. About that time, my husband came home to find me standing at the sink, although jumping up and down hysterically might be more descriptive. The garbage disposal was running. Pans of water were boiling. I told him about the spider.

He came downstairs after his shower. Since he rides a bike home from work he gets sweaty so he always showers when he gets home. The garbage disposal was still running. He told me “I think you got it”. Just to be safe, I ran the disposal for five more minutes. Thankfully, we haven’t seen the spider since.

This week, Pat fixed the sprayer from the sink. It had somehow been yanked out of the little ring that holds it in place. Also, we’ll be spending “black Friday” looking for a new garbage disposal. At the moment we have a large pot under ours to catch the drips. He discovered our garbage disposal was leaking when he had to go on a bug hunt under the sink to make sure spidey went down the drain and didn’t have a large family of relatives waiting close by.

My husband thinks our garbage disposal was just old and claims our daughter told him a while ago she thought it was leaking. Personally, I think the spider tried to eat its way out from the inside. Venomous spiders are like that, you know.  Besides this whole poisenous spider thing just brings home another good point.  Kitchens are a dangerous place.  The giant man eating spider the size of a Buick is a good reason to stay out of the kitchen and eat out.  Heck, restaurants have to be inspected so they must be safe.  And besides, my favorite thing to make for dinner is reservations.

Falling For Fall

It’s fall. One of my favorite seasons – right next to spring, summer and winter. Seriously though, I love fall and it is absolutely one of my favorites. I’m a fair weather friend when it comes to winter, especially if my joints start to ache in the cold. I like looking at white stuff, but not shoveling it and snow makes an obstacle course for me to get to fill my bird feeder. Although I bet my sweet husband would snow blow a path for me, if I asked him to. Especially if I removed the landscaping rocks that tend to booby trap the snow blower.

Back to fall. I’m a bit of a fair weather friend when it comes to fall, too. I like fall when there’s still green grass, but no bugs. I like fall when there’s still leaves on the trees, especially after they turn all the wonderful colors. I like fall before frost, although the frost is pretty on things.

I don’t like frost if we have to scrape it off of windshields, particularly on the mornings after we’ve forgotten to put our cars in the car. I also don’t like that frost kills all my flowers and the plants I’ve painstakingly put in the flower beds.

But there’s a reason for everything, isn’t there? This year, I tried to persuade the squirrels to give the birds a break and leave my bird feeders alone by bribing them with peanuts. I bought a bag of unsalted peanuts in the shell from our grocery store.

I toss a few of them on the front porch and the ground squirrels, whom I’ve named “Chip” and “Dale” come and scurry them away. The front feeder is on a shepherd’s hook and the squirrels haven’t figured out a way to get to that feeder, although they have relentlessly tried. So the squirrels have to be content with what falls on the ground in the front. There is plenty on the ground for them so they should have no worries.

Being creatures of habit and not trusting that the bird feeder will always be filled, the squirrels – and ground squirrels I am sure, have stored away plenty of the fallen bird seed, as well as quite a few peanuts.  I discovered this because they like the two pots I have on the front porch in which I’ve planted geraniums. The geraniums in the pots have quite a time. It was not unusual this summer for me to get the morning paper and discover dirt all over the front porch. The geraniums would look bedraggled and it was clear that someone had ulterior designs on the pots.

So I would patiently sweep the dirt up, put it back in the pots and water them, hoping the geraniums would pull through. They did. The ulterior motives became very clear, though, when I discovered an assortment of sprouts popping up beside the geraniums. I patient pulled the sprouts out and began my war with the varmints.

We also have a feeder on our deck. The squirrels, “Itchy” and “Twitchy” have a hey day with this feeder because they can get to it. They bound up the deck steps, climb the railing and gorge themselves.   One is a little braver and more agile than the other. One keeps his feet on the railing and reaches for the feeder, and then spends several minutes chowing down. The other leaps on the feeder and hangs upside down from the top, picking through the seeds to get the corn and sunflower seeds he wants.

I say “he” because there is another squirrel who is not so fidgety who comes just for the peanuts I toss on the deck. I don’t have a name for her yet. Maybe I’ll call her “Black Beauty” because she is an oddly marked squirrel with a lot of black in her coat, reminiscent of the black squirrels I have seen in Council Bluffs. Around here, squirrels are basically a reddish brick brown.

I am sure she is a she because she has figured out there is plenty of food to be had without risking life and limb for the bird feeder. Call it women’s intuition or faith or maybe lack of testosterone, but whatever it is, she has figured out that the birds will spill the seeds on the deck and that there will be peanuts and breadcrumbs daily.

I did have to move the birdfeeder from the deck to the back yard this summer, though, when our youngest daughter was home from college. I spent summer mornings on the deck drinking my morning coffee, reading the paper, writing and enjoying my bird visitors. She spent summer afternoons sunning and reading. The birds got used to us and, while they kept their distance, they would still flock to the deck. I found them cool and wonderous. She found them creepy and messy. And, so the feeder was moved to a shepherd’s hood in the back yard until she went back to school in the fall.

My war with the varmints has continued. They dug little holes all over our back yard. In particular, one spot under a tree is hazardous and pockmarked with a whole village full of holes. I have a bit of trouble with that spot when I mow. I never see critters by it, so I filled it up with potting soil and compost this fall. No one has dug a way out, so it must be an abandoned place.

I discovered a talent that my little friends have that I covet. I have tried for years to grow sunflowers and I have never been successful. This spring I tried again. I bought “systems” for starting plants. I bought fancy packets of seeds. I poured water on disks of peat moss and inserted sunflower seeds. I waited for sprouts. The sprouts came and croaked. I was able to get a few moss roses to grow but that was it. No sunflowers again this year. Maybe next year will be better for growing giant sunflowers. But, under the front bird feeder we have all kinds of sprouts – corn and sunflowers. The sunflowers were not the giant ones I envisioned, but tiny ones that grew, made flowers and wilted. Some were volunteers that thrived among the landscaping river rocks. Some were ones that were planted for future use by my buddies.

We are having glorious fall days with temperatures in the 70s. Who knew? Back in August I was wearing my winter coat on night shoots for the movies because it was dipping down to the low forties and I was freezing. Our night shoots were outside in a cornfield. I had on a long sleeved sweater, my cuddle duds, my winter coat, hat, gloves and waterproof thermal boots. Now I am wearing my short sleeved polo shirts and working outside in the yard. I saw a number of people in shorts today. This is okay by me. I can take 70 degree temperatures all month.

Last month my friend and I went for a train ride. We had been planning it for years and we actually got it pulled off. We had a blast. We drove to Boone, about an hour from Des Moines and rode the Scenic Valley Train. The trees were in full fall color and we snapped lots of pictures from the train. On one spot on the route, someone had carved faces in the tree. The conductor called our attention to the tree faces.

The ride goes for a few miles to a ‘turn around’. Then the engine does a little circle on the track and moves to the other end of the train. Then the engine pulls the train back to Boone. It was great fun and we loved seeing the puffs of smoke coming from our train engine. We had a fantastic day that day, complete with a lunch at a little tea place that both of us have wanted to visit forever but never had. Something always got in the way, usually my schedule.

Now that I think of it, there’s really little point in putting off those special places. Just go for the gusto, baby, and enjoy the day- all the way every day! After all, tomorrow could bring frost, no leaves on the trees and more excuses not to do the things you’ve always wanted to do.  So, pick up a leaf, make a wish and do something special for yourself – right now. There really is no time just like the moment.