The Spider's Tale

This is a true story and an old story. Those of you who are my Facebook friends, which I'm guessing is probably everyone reading this except the Russian spammers who pump up my page view count every day, may have read it already. It took place two years ago, but in the spirit of a really good Dateline episode, it has been re-enacted and now has pictures! Enjoy! --S.P. Sep 2012

 

The other night I pulled into the garage and started to be-bop into my house when I happened to look down and see a HUGE spider between me and my back door.

 

I jumped back toward my car. The spider was big, black, as big as a cotton ball---and it wasn’t moving.

My first thought was to call for Captain America. Wasn’t it he who promised 26 years ago to love, honor, obey, take out the trash, and kill spiders and bugs? But as usual when the trash was full or giant arachnids stood in my way, he was at 35,000 feet.

OK, I thought, I’ll step on it. I looked down at my shoes. I was wearing very flimsy sandals. I started to imagine drawing close to the spider and having it jump up onto my shoe and then up my leg. I let out a slight scream at the thought. No, stepping on it wouldn’t work. I needed something bigger.

I know, I thought. I’ll run over it with my car. I LOVE my Prius and it loves me back. It reads out directions when I’m trying to find my way, it shows me what’s behind me when I back up, it won’t let me lock the keys in the car, it gets 48 miles per gallon. Now, I thought, it will come to my rescue and kill the giant spider that won’t let me in my house.

I jumped back into the Prius and started it up. I backed it up just a couple of feet, cranked the steering as far to the right as I could and then creeped forward. I pumped the brakes as I tried to get as close to the garage cabinets as I could without hitting them. Surely that spider is just an oily spot on the garage floor, I thought, as I backed the car up again, turned it off, and got out.

The spider, completely intact, looked back at me from the same place I left it. It hadn’t budged an inch.

Dang it!

Now I started to panic, because I was pretty sure I hadn’t put a key to the new house in my purse yet and the only way into the house was being guarded by that big, hairy spider.

I looked around for another weapon. On the other side of the garage I spotted a broom that the last owners had left. I grabbed it and turned back to the spider, who still hadn’t moved. I stood there for a minute to gather my courage and then jabbed at the spider with the broom. The spider jumped, finally aware that I had no good intentions toward it, and hunched down like a Duke guard in a full court press.

I took another deep breath, my heart pumping so hard my shirt was moving. I brought the broom back behind my head like a 7 iron, and with a great scream of “Get out of my garage!!”, I swung it down.

It was a direct hit and the spider went tumbling across the floor toward the garage door—SPEWING A MILLION SPIDER BABIES AS IT WENT!!!!!


The floor was swarming with the Mama spider and her progeny as I stood there in my very flimsy sandals.

I went completely ballistic, frantically sweeping at the babies who crawled into every nook and cranny of the garage and swatting at their mother, who spewed out another million spider babies every time I hit her.



I screamed at the top of my lungs, “How dare you get in my garage! Get out of my garage! Don’t you go behind that box! Get out of my garage!” all the time swinging the broom like a cross between a whirling dervish and Dick Van Dyke singing “Chim Chim Cheree” in Mary Poppins.

The baby spiders continued to elude,



but I finally swept Mama spider outside the garage door. I was so full of adrenaline and vengeance that I turned the broom flat and pounded her to a pulp, screaming at each smash, “Don’t…you…ever…come…into…my …garage…again!”

 

 

I turned back around to face the baby spiders, and while many of them still scurried here and there,



 most of them had crawled back into the deep dark recesses of the garage, biding their time until they come out to avenge the awful circumstances of their birth and the terrible thing I did to their mother. 

 

 

  

A special thanks to #1 son and his bride for their help with photography and props to make this re-enactment possible.

 

In Memoriam: Mama Spider 2010-2010 

 

Book Review: 11/22/63

Title: 11/22/63
Author: Stephen King
Format: Audiobook
Reading Dates: July 14 - Sep 11, 2012
Rating: **** 1/2

It was May 1981. School had been out only a couple of days, but I had already left for the bustling metropolis of Hydro, Oklahoma, population a smidge under 1000 or about the size of the Psychology 1103 class I had just finished in Norman. My roommate that summer was Debra, an old schoolmate who had let me bunk at her house the summer before while we both worked at the local bank presidented by a mutual family friend and who had agreed to the same arrangements this particular summer.

The first summer we were together we shared a teeny-tiny house in Weatherford, but only a few weeks before I moved back to town, Debra had purchased a new mobile home right off the I-40 in Hydro and life was going to be good. We each had our own bedroom, a spacious living room, and a full kitchen. The week that I moved in, however, Debra was on vacation, so she left me a key, instructions about which bedroom was mine, and word that she would be back in a week.

The house was so new that she was still furnishing it and while it had a great couch and a working fridge, there was no TV yet, so I had to find something to entertain myself each evening after work. I decided, of course, to read. And my book of choice that week was The Shining by Stephen King. It was one of the stupidist things I ever decided to do. Each night I would read a few chapters, then lay the book on my chest for 30 minutes while I got up the nerve to turn off the reading lamp, get up off the couch, and make the ten-step beeline in the dark to my bedroom door. I was so petrified that I haven't read Stephen King since.

Until now.

I decided to give 11/22/63 a shot because it was getting really good press over on Audible.com, and I'm glad I did. 11/22/63 is definitely a page-turner--scratch that--a drive-maker, because I would find myself taking the long way home just so I could listen a little longer. Stephen King writes stories that sound good out loud.

In the novel protaganist Jake Epping is introduced to a wormhole through time by Al Templeton, the owner of a local diner. The wormhole takes anyone who goes through it to Sept 9, 1958 and no matter how long they stay there, when they come back only 2 minutes have passed. Al convinces Jake that he should go through the wormhole and stay until 11/22/63 and prevent the Kennedy assassination. Al tells Jake that he tried to do it himself, but now has cancer and knew he would die before being able to complete the task, and so now he's asking Jake to take over.

Jake reluctantly agrees to do it after realizing that he might be able to change not only Kennedy's fate, but also that of others he knows who suffered tragedy during that same time, and so off he goes for a 5-year stint in the past.

But the past doesn't want to be changed.

This was a long book, and most of the sub-plots could have been novellas of their own, but the story kept my attention throughout and as I said above I couldn't wait to find out what would happen next or how King was going to bring all the time-travelling threads together in the end.

Kudos also to Craig Wasson, the narrator, whose myriad voices kept the audio entertaining and easy to follow. Ironically, I thought he sounded too old to be Jake, but all the other voices were spot on--even the Bill Clinton and Jimmy Stewart sound-alikes.

I'm taking away a half star for the length which I think could have been pared down a bit with no real impact to the story, but this is a rip-roaring yarn that left me in tears at the end. Highly recommended!

Scary Boo Boos

You learn from your mistakes, right? Well, I ought to be really smart by now. Here are some of my latest screw-ups and what I learned, or as I like to think of it, the good twin/bad twin post.

Case in point, the first bad twin.

It's getting close to Halloween and I decided I wanted to make a jack-o-lantern, so I found a cute stencil online, made myself a pattern, started folding and ended up with...... this hot mess.

Egad! Not at all what I was expecting. My cute little jack-o-lantern turned out like something from Friday the 13th only with a couple more teeth.

Hmmm...maybe, I thought, it would look more like a cute jack-o-lantern if I folded all the "non-face" parts away.

Well, that didn't work. What if I folded the extra pages into a circle of points instead, sorta like the outline of a pumpkin around the face?

Yikes, no! 

and so now he sits on a shelf in my attic looking something like this--Reader's Digest meets Frankenstein's monster meets the Lion King. (If someone makes that into a real movie, I call dibs on the royalties!)

I would feel sorry for him, if he weren't so darn...

I regrouped. Folding books, I told myself, is sorta like making an ice sculpture. You just chip/fold away the parts that don't look like your subject.

Aha! I suddenly realized that I had made the pumpkin face backward. It was as if I cut away all the pumpkin and just left orange where the eyes, nose and mouth were supposed to be. So I tried it again, only backwards this time, and got the good twin.

Now that's a little better. Next time I think I'll add a stem and then he'll be just about perfect.

And now... Bad twin #2 starring in I've got a case of the boos.

I decided that I hadn't made a word with really big letters in awhile, so I decided to go with Boo! I picked a font and started folding and got all the way to the end...

and the exclamation point was way to skinny to be seen, so I just tore it out. Now it's just Boo. I added ravens to the end papers to make it more scary because no one is going to be startled by just Boo. The bogeyman could come out from under the bed and say Boo Boo Boo as many time as he wanted and we would all just laugh, because we know exclamation points are important!!!!

Maybe I should just redo it with Mardi Gras paper for all my Louisiana friends.

"I love you, boo."

"I love you, too, boo."

But good twin to the rescue. I folded another and this time made the exclamation point nice and big and it turned out like this:

Scared you, didn't I! 

And then for good measure I picked a smaller, different font and did it again.

Sorry! I hope your heart can handle all this terror! (Oops, I just said terror on the Internet. Now I'm probably on the no-fly list.)

I can't decide which one is my favorite. The big letters are much deeper and you can see the dark text inside them which goes well with the glittery, black witches of the end papers. I think they give this Boo! a really ominous feeling, perfect for Halloween.

The smaller letters aren't folded as deep, so this Boo! has a much lighter, "five-year-olds trick-or-treating" vibe going on. 

So which one do you like best, boo?

#1                           or                         #2

Michener's Colors

When I was a kid I always liked babysitting for the Andersons. It wasn't because they introduced me to cheese fondue (although I will be forever grateful) or that they paid a dollar an hour when everyone else was paying 50 cents (well, maybe it was a little bit that). Truth be told, the real reason I liked babysitting for them was because they had very well behaved kids, and when it was bedtime, they went to bed. No whining. No fifteen trips to the bathroom or the kitchen for a glass of water. Tuck 'em in, and out they'd go. And that meant I had the rest of the evening to read.

And back in those days I was usually reading James Michener. I read Chesapeake, and Centenniel, and The Covenant, and for some reason I especially remember reading The Source on the big couch in the Anderson's living room. I loved Michener for all the reasons that many people find him tedious--because every book started at the very, very beginning and took epic journeys through time in a single place. For weeks I'd be totally wrapped up in whatever place I was reading about and the generations who peopled it.

Now I have another reason to love Michener. His books make great flower vases. 

I lucked out when I first started ripping the guts out of books so I could fill them with paper flowers. I found a copy of Michener's Caribbean at the Goodwill Store. It was the perfect proportions for a vase--tall and thick. It had a shiny palm on the front cover, and it was a orange, which is my new favorite color since I was told I was not allowed to buy anything else purple.  

My Caribbean vase sits in my office where I can see it every workday. Despite being one of my first works, it is still one of my favorites.

The flowers in Caribbean are simple ones. I watched a YouTube video to learn how to make them.

The problem, so Captain America told me one day, is that the flowers are all white. "They need some color!"   

That was the day he came home with the can of orange spray paint.

Really.

"Watch this!" he said, as he grabbed a couple of flowers off my craft table and began spraying away. In my house. "It'll look great!"

Eh, not so much. But I'll admit that the idea of adding color started to grow on me.

And that's when Michener found his way back into my life again. Actually, I found him out in the garage. I was looking for gardening tools one day when I ran across a long forgotten copy of Texas stashed in a corner. For being as mistreated as it had been out in the garage, the book was in pretty good shape. The cover was still a beautiful blue and there was a very cool star on the front. 

I took it up to my craft room and, as fortune would have it, set it down right next to that stack of kitschy pictures that I had ripped out of all the RDCBs. Remember these?

And that's when inspiration hit. So here is Michener's Texas reimagined by me:

It features bluebonnets...

and Indian Paintbrush...

...and of course yellow roses.

There's a little bit of whimsy, a little bit of text, and a whole lot of color going on. Welcome back, Mr Michener. Nice to have you around again.

Good Things, and By Good I Mean Free!!

Two quick pieces of news:

1. Drumroll......I finally got my domain name functioning, so now you can bookmark my blog at readingwithscissors.com. Whoo-hoo! No more dashes; no more blogspot.com, although both of those should still work if you need them to.
2. Amazon announced WhisperSync for Voice today. Buy a Kindle book, add the Audible audiobook version to your purchase, and WhisperSync for Voice will synchronize your reading.
   
   This is going to be great at our house. Captain America is always snoring in my ear late at night, so now I can start reading my Kindle and then when I get in the car to go to lunch the next day, I can plug in my iPhone and listen to the same book in the car AND Whispersync starts the audiobook right where I left off in the Kindle! Wowser!
   
   But better news than that is that right now, Amazon/Audible is offering 20 free titles to try it out. These are all classic books, and if you've had a Kindle for awhile, you've probably seen free classics before. But the really good part is that right now the Audible part is free, too. This isn't a public domain recording they're offering, but the real live professionally recorded versions with narrators like Davinia Porter and John Lee.
   
   I've already downloaded about 15 of the titles. (Did I mention I'm a hoarder?) Interested? Start here:  http://www.amazon.com/s/?node=5744839011.

Barb's Dictionary

This is Barb.

Barb is my spiritual advisor when it comes to decorating and crafts. One Christmas she drove 20 miles to give me advice on decorating my house for Christmas. We went with a poinsettia staircase to rave reviews.

This is the vintage dictionary that Barb bought for 99 cents on eBay. Barb is the reason God created eBay.

Look how thick that puppy is! That's a LOT of dictionary pages. 





I love dictionary pages. Barb loves dictionary pages. We are sympatico. If we were on Pinterest, we would follow each other.

Wait, we are on Pinterest and we do follow each other. Barb is the reason God created Pinterest.

Barb does not fold dictionary pages; she wallpapers with them. Here is Barb's bathroom.

Barb carefully cut each of those dictionary pages to size and then Mod Podged them onto her bathroom walls. Barb has created my dream bathroom.

This is the bouquet I (finally) made for Barb for helping me decorate my house that Christmas.

I made the vase from a copy of The Winston Simplified Dictionary that I found in an antique store.

It was a win-win. Barb got the bouquet and I got the dictionary pages. I love to make flowers from dictionary pages.

Here are the flowers I made from The Winston Simplified Dictionary.

Here are some dark-centered flowers I made from Barb's gigantic dictionary. See how the small, tight font of the dictionary flowers plays against the more generous font of other books? That is why I love dictionary pages.



 And here is Barb in a scene from her recent European vacation reimagined as a pop-up card.

The outside

The inside

(Look, Barb, we can print on dictionary pages, too!)