Because of the way my day went yesterday, I had to get up this morning to come in to work and finish up one of the tests I'm working on. Since it looked like it was going to be a nice day, and I had no kids to pick up/ferry around afterwards, I decided to take the bike, which has been languishing under its cover in the shop since we moved in.
I pulled the cover off, put the keys in the ignition, pulled out the choke and went to start the bike. The starter button is by the right hand grip, and as I grabbed the grip, I saw movement.
The biggest, fattest, nastiest looking black widow with a huge bright hour-glass was suspended by its thread from the grip not four inches from my hand.
I hopped off that bike so fast it rocked, almost going over (a five hundred pound bike), frantically looking around for something to get the little bastard with. After a few seconds of my trying to grab it with my retractable-claw-tool-picker-upper-thingy, the spider dropped to the ground where it was introduced rather forcefully to the sole of my boot.
I don't care very much for spiders as a whole, but black widows really reach down into my reptile brain and yank on that fear-reflex pretty hard.
In this case, it jerked my groggy, sleep addled mind into full awareness instantly.
Fear beats coffee every time.
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4 comments:
I've only seen a black widow once, and it was one summer when I was taking my stuff out of a storage unit. It was beautiful with that glossy black body, and I squealed as I practically levitated 20 feet away from it in about half a second. Then I came back and squished the ever-loving shit out of it. Yes, quite a stimulant, that.
In the old days Black Widows were the scourge of miners' and frontiersmans' outhouses... To catch edibles, they built their webs in the dark, below and surrounding the hole.
KILL THEM!!!
Oh yes, but what is the bike whereof you speak?
My 1998 HD Sportster 1200, although I live close enough to work now that I could conceivably take my Huffy...
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