Yeah. I know. Sounds like such a serious title. To be honest, my life has had way too much serious lately, so I’m hoping to keep this light. For that, you need kittehs.

I’ve been stacking on the life changes lately. Sprinting out of my realm of safety and security as if it were on fire. Some of the things I've been dealing with are:

A death in the family (not getting deep into this as it would go against the keeping it light plan).
This thing I’m waiting on (don’t want to jinx it by talking about it too much).
This thing my husband is waiting on (yeah, don’t want to jinx that either).
Some other stuff (no, I don’t think that’s too vague).
Preparing our house to put on the market so that we can move into the city. This one I’ll talk about.

There’s little good about getting a house ready to sell. Inevitably, the moment you decide to sell, you start noticing all the things that are wrong with the house and property that fell off the radar into the selective blindness we all get when we just don't have enough time. The lawn needs some TLC, the carpet is actually heinously ugly, the walls aren’t much better, the barn needs cleaning up, and you have way too much junk lying around.

To start things rolling, you hire someone for the yard work, which seems like a good plan. Then they get sick and someone in their family dies and you can’t really be mad about it, right? You’ve been sick a few times lately and you’ve had a recent death in the family. You should totally understand. Still, you’re secretly somewhat mad about it because the work isn’t getting done and, after all that time spent searching your soul and reconciling with selling your house, you want to get it done NOW.

And then...

Yes. You decide to paint the interior. No big. You start painting the walls in one room, and this is when you realize not only how much you hated the wall color, but that the ceiling is an awful shade of pale pinkish-gray and the dark wood trim looks like hell. Now you have to paint the ceilings and the trim too. What started as a one or two weekend project is now a several month long arduous task. Not to mention, you still have to find time for work and play (yes, play is necessary to keep you from turning into a bug-eyed spastic lunatic). If you haven’t caught on yet, this is one of those things where the more you do, the more you feel like you need to do.

But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because we like to talk about spiders.

No?

Well, I like to talk about them.

I live in the Pacific Northwest. This is an amazing place. It’s beautiful, a wee bit damp, and full of critters, critters that are largely non-venomous/poisonous. I feel rather safe wrangling a random snake or moving spiders out of the house. That isn’t to say that there aren’t spiders I prefer not to tangle with, but the likelihood of encountering something that can do serious damage or even threaten your life is slim.

This always seemed a good thing to me until last week. I was in southern Oregon visiting family and I had a few small spider encounters.

The Jumper:

You know how I feel about these guys if you’ve been following my blog for long. If not, you can find out more in my post Talking with Spiders: The House Rules. As I’ve said before, jumping spiders are cute as hell and the one I found crawling along my pant leg was double-cute with sugar on top. He was tiny and would have been a perfect model for a jumping spider plush toy.

I caught him on my hand, he was so small I couldn’t even feel it as he crawled along my fingers, and relocated him to a windowsill. When my husband poked a finger at him, he crouched back and held his front bits up in a valiant display of ferocity that made me giggle. Love those fuzzy little blokes.

The next spider wasn’t a jumper. He was one of those black widow shaped ones that I express a less tolerant attitude toward in my earlier post about spiders. Still, I’m always trying to give everyone a fair chance so, recalling the jumping spider I’d moved the prior day, I caught this little critter up on my sleeve and moved it outside. It was then, as I dropped it off on the porch, that I realized it really did look an awful lot like a black widow. In fact, given that I was in southern Oregon, the odds seemed good that it could have been one.

I guess that’s what happens when you get too used to feeling safe all the time.

So there you have it. Life lessons from a spider wrangler and a few reasons not to sell your house.

Happy adventuring!