Curse of the Black Widow!!!

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LLigetfa said:
Spiders bring good luck and are beneficial. Spiders are treated like sacred cows in our house. That said, we never have any spiders come in with the wood. I think the mice and the snakes in the wood pile keep the spiders away.

THAT'S IT! She needs more snakes and mice inside her house! At least there won't be any more trepidation over spiders.
 
Ahhh, the double dog dare of snake and mice stories!!! These make the yellow spider story pale.

So I go into the cabin one hot July afternoon and am in a hurry to get to the potty and have my pants halfway down and ready for the release, sit on the pot without even bothering to turn on the light and I feel something akin to a fat fingered corpse against my bum. I shot up, again like I was on a bungee cord and peed all over my legs and feet and there in the toilet was a big fat blow snake (looks like a rattler but is not venemous, just bites hard). I'm screaming bloody murder so loud the neighbors come running just as I'm pulling my wet jeans up and I'm screaming, "THERE'S A SNAKE IN MY TOILET!!!". So this guy peeks in just as the snake is slithering through the little hole in the sheetrock where the clean out plug is.

I spend the weekend completely paranoid and actually drive to the gas station to use the potty on a couple of occasions (and to refill my Dr. Pepper, which causes me to pee a lot) but sure enough that Sunday we're watching Simpsons and down the stairs comes this big fat snake. I'm screaming again, ready to put the house up for sale and my husband manages to catch the thing and only gets bit once and he takes it outside and releases it in a field two blocks away. I wanted him to put it in the window well of a more nosy neighbor but he's just too nice.

So later that summer I'm wondering why I have so many blow snakes around the property and then I go into the big shed and it's just loaded with blow snakes and rattlers and I can smell mouse droppings. I wait till late fall when they're either gone or too slow and sleepy to bother me and find that the mandatory (the mandatory part is a long unpleasant story) food storage of red wheat in plastic buckets that I once was so thrilled to have has split down the sides from the weight of the upper buckets and the mice have had a hey day eating all that wheat. Then the snakes came because they had plenty of mice to eat.

I no longer store red wheat or anything else that I can't eat in less than a year. It was really more like my 500 yr. food storage because I hadn't used it in 20 yrs. and don't even know how to bake bread or have a wheat grinder so probably wouldn't use it in another 480 years either.
 
I used to store grass seed in a 5 gal pail with a lid, but it didn't dawn on me to plug the small 1/2 inch vent hole. When I opened the pail I found lots of dead mice. It's amazing how small of a space they can squeeze through. I now store seed in metal garbage cans. The smell still attracts the mice so I've had to carefully seal up all their points of entry on the tool shed. I keep bird seed in a metal garbage can in our screened gazebo and the dam rodents chewed holes through the screen. I should put a cat door on the gazebo.

I also store empty pails in the wood shed and sometimes find dead mice in them if the cat doesn't find them first. As I take down my wood stacks I find lots of mice nests and snake skins. It gives the wife the heebie jeebies to see bits of snake skin stuck to the splits I bring in the house.
 
Yaa, i have one of those window scars about the size of a dime and as deep as a nickle just below the left rib cage. This may be hard to imagine, but i was sleeping like a dog smack azzz in front of the wood burner when i felt something like a hot needle in my side.I sat up brushed my side , turned my head and saw those great secondary's laid back down and fell asleep with that heat on my back. Next morning it was sore now. After a few weeks i began to wonder just how dang long it would take to heal and what was up with strange pain every few days that just seemed to radiate through my body ... lol. well after a few months every thing was cool. So in the end spiders still don't bug me and i know its not like scars from a shark bite or scars from a good ol bear maulin but hey il take it lol
 
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