Welcomed Home by Eight Legs or More (And a Canadian)

We had some mild excitement my first night home.  Around bedtime, when we were yawning on the sofa and stretching our arms and discussing the pleasing prospect of fresh sheets and pillows under our heads, Mr Tabubil let out a hell of a yell -  and we saw a gigantic cockroach sauntering merrily across the living room floor.  Quite two inches in length, it was. I dropped a book on it and took the remains outside - taking due care and diligence as I cross the threshold.  We have hit summer cockroach season, the time where if we step outside we have to do it FAST and watch the door frame to catch 'em scuttling in.  Where they will create monster colonies of monstrous cockroaches that will chew holes in our underwear and breed in our socks.  

            The horror bug dispatched, Mr Tabubil climbed down from the arm of the sofa and went off to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  In a fit of misdirection he stuck his head into the laundry instead- and bellowed loud enough to wake the peaceful dead.  This time I ended up on the arm of the sofa.  (My adrenalin was up.  So there.)

            A huge and hairy huntsman spider had dropped off the ceiling right next to his head and into our stack of re-usable shopping bags.  (South Australia is very pro-active on the plastic shopping bag issue.  Our state's attitude gives one fits of the superior-minded smuggeries when one is up in Queensland and being handed cart-loads of plastic bags whenever one visits the supermarket.)

Mr Tabubil bellowed, dancing from toe to toe.
            "It was enormous!"

             "How enormous?" I asked.  

            "This enormous!" he said spreading his fingers wider than the width of my own hand.

            I was skeptial.  Huntsmen just don't get that big up here.

            "Fine." He chuckled nervously.  He moved his fingers toward each other by two centimeters.  "This big, okay?  And hairy."

            Lovely.  First an enormous cockroach, now a full size, out of season huntsman.

            "The first thing" I said, "is to move all the other stuff out of here."

            "Brilliant!"  Mr Tabubil said, from outside in the corridor.  From over on the other side of the house in the kitchen, actually.

            Gingerly, I began to clear the room, and found that, courtesy of a damp kitchen towel, the  laundry basket had turned into a space-habitat for ants. Bravely, Mr Tabubil steeled himself enter the chamber of horrors and run a hot wash in the washing machine, and I carried the rest of the laundry out into the corridor.  He yelled again.

            "It's coming right up the side of a supermarket bag!  Can you see it?  Can you see it?  It's right there!  It's right there!!!" 

            I came running. Oh.  Oh yeah.  There it was, all right. The big scary monster. A little quarter-scale South Australia huntsman spider.  No fur.  Barely two inches across.

            "Do I have to kill it?" I sighed.

            "Yes!"

So I squashed the poor thing between two shoes.  And gave Mr Tabubil a very VERY fishy stink-eye.

            "Bigger than my hand, huh?  The poor baby."

Two night ago we found another two-inch huntsman in the bedroom - scuttling out of my pajama pants as I picked them up to put them on.  Mr Tabubil is still smarting from the indignities of last week - this one made it outside alive in a drinking glass.

            However.  My Aunt and Uncle A came to stay with us over the long weekend, and Auntie A told me that the things live in pairs.  And as much as I choose to believe in a live and let live philosophy of life, I draw the line at sharing my pajama bottoms with eight other legs. 

The hunt is seriously on.