am the lucky one, aren’t I? I need to invest in shirts that are low in the back so I can show off my badass scar.
And for the record, I’m not worried. “Precancerous” means “If you wait long enough, it’ll become cancerous, but it isn’t yet”, so I’m just glad I actually had that physical. I made Fred take a picture of the spot on my back, since it’s in a place I can’t see and I was wondering what it looked like, and can I just say HOLY SHIT do I have a lot of freckles on my back! I had no idea. Luckily they’re all those little tiny freckles and not the big scary melanoma-looking ones. With all the sunburns I got as a kid, I’m surprised I don’t have to have all the skin on my body removed.
(You do know the mole warning signs, right? Keep an eye on your moles!)
* * *
Speaking of my skin issues, I have to keep a bandaid over the spot on my stomach. Regular bandaids just won’t cut it in the morning, because I sweat (heh – I originally typed “swear”. Which is also true!) profusely when I’m working out, and any regular bandaid will just slide off after a while. This morning when I was digging around in the basket where we keep our large collection of bandaids, I found a waterproof bandaid that sticks on all sides, and it swore on the box that the bandaid would stay in place through anything you could throw at it. I put it on, and went to work out, and sure enough the bandaid didn’t budge at all.
When I took the bandaid off to take a shower, a small pool of sweat poured out. Gross. Yet also somehow cool. Is it better to let the spot marinate in a pool of sweat, or go without a bandaid for a little while?
I suspect the latter.
* * *
I realized as I was vacuuming the downstairs this morning just how many damn spiders we have living in our house. I counted at least seven corners inhabited by spiders, and I’m sure there are many more. Like I’ve said before, as long as they keep their webs clean, I’ll let them stay. The problem is that spiders don’t actually eat bugs – they paralyze them and then suck the juices out of them, then toss the bug shell that’s left over out of the web. There were no less than eight bug shells on the floor under the web of the spider who lives in a corner of the kitchen. Did I suck up the spider who was making the mess? No, I vacuumed up the bug shells and let the spider stay. Because he’s killing the bugs like he’s supposed to!
It is absolutely an amazing thing that I’m letting these spiders live in my house without freaking out, because as a kid I hated any kind of spider. Once (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before) there was a spider in my room and I didn’t dare to get close enough to kill it and Debbie wouldn’t kill it for me, so we sprayed the fucking thing with half a can of furniture spray until it stopped moving.
Most of the spiders in the house are fairly small-bodied with long legs. The spiders I can’t stand (and will either kill or shoo out of the house, depending on how close to the door they are when I spot them) are
grass spiders. They tend to be HUGE – when we lived in the other house, we left a foam noodle in the pool one night. The next morning we decided to go for a swim. On the noodle was a grass spider the SIZE OF MY FUCKING HAND, and it was covered with baby grass spiders.
::shudder::
The other kind of spider I really, really don’t like is one I didn’t know the name of until I happened to find the page I linked above. It’s the
jumping spider. Not only do they have what appears to be pincer-like front legs (I always think they look like tiny crabs), THE FUCKERS JUMP. REALLY FAR. LIKE FOUR TIMES THE LENGTH OF THEIR LITTLE BODIES. Ugh.
I actually found a couple of jumping spiders facing off in the kitchen this morning.
I put a cup over them, slid a piece of paper under the cup, and took them outside. When I dumped them out of the cup, one of them immediately JUMPED TOWARD ME. Little fucker.
Spider pictures that have made me shudder this morning: the
banana spider (UGH), the
black widow (those things just look SO FUCKING EVIL), and the
golden rod spider.
I don’t know about you, but after looking at all those spider pictures, I’m feeling all itchy, as though thousands of spiders are crawling on me…
* * *
A couple of people asked in the comments yesterday whether it bothers the spud that I clean her room and get rid of stuff while she’s gone in the summer. It hasn’t so far, and she’s always glad to see her room clean and straightened when she gets home. This is actually the first year I’ve cleaned her room that I haven’t tossed any toys, mainly because she’s gotten older and isn’t getting so many toys that she never plays with. I’m going to take down the Little Mermaid poster and put a bulletin board in it’s place, but I’m going to keep the poster (it’s a nice one that her father’s cousin gave her when she was little) and if she decides that she wants it back, we’ll find another place on her wall to hang it.
As for the shirts, I’ve packed them away so that if at some point after she gets home she says “Where’s my (blank) shirt?” I can go dig it out. It hasn’t happened in the five years, though, and I expect it won’t happen this year either, since I talked to her the other day and it sounds like she’s already got a ton of clothes to bring home with her! I generally give the old clothes until around Christmas, and if she hasn’t needed something I’ve packed away by then, I figure she never will, and I donate it to charity.
* * *
Yellow lilies. Pretty, eh?
* * *
I got the BEST LINK EVER from
Laura this morning –
Maine Goodies has anything an exiled Mainer could ever wish for. I’m particularly drooling over the whoopie pies and lobster stew!
* * *
Spot. He’s in his bed! (He spends all day in his bed. I suspect he does the exciting stuff at night when we’re asleep)
]]>