The most recent last Saturday, while I was sleeping, my wife was (as is her usual routine) running around town doing her grocery shopping.  When she got home, she started bringing in the groceries, only to find a potentially dangerous spider perched on the inner door handle of the back porch.  After some online research, she thought she’d identified it as a Brown Recluse.

So, she brought the groceries in through the front door.  I was still asleep, and never heard the scream she said she delivered when she saw the spider.  However, I’ve never had any reason to doubt her, so if she says she screamed, I believe she did.

Somewhere around 6 hours later, I woke up, and heard her tale about meeting the spider.  Since an exhaustive search didn’t locate it, I continued about my normal routine.  At around midnight, I noticed a need to take out the trash, and in the process of doing that, I had a very short but adrenaline fueled adventure!

You see, my wife saw the spider on the outside door handle of the inner door of our back porch.  When I was taking out the trash, I went (as is my normal habit) through the back door.  It’s the most direct route to the trash dumpster.  Only after I’d already opened the back door, and walked through it and closed it, did I remember her story to me about the spider.

Spiders are one of the very few life forms on this planet that I have anything approaching a phobia about.  To suddenly find myself halfway between safety and a potentially deadly spider, without having realized I was putting myself in the cross hairs before I got there, caused about 3 seconds of INTENSE panic.

The end result was, I finished taking the trash to the outside dumpster, and returned to the interior of our home, without having any problems of an arachnid nature..  However, it took six hours and several glasses of vodka before I could relax enough to try to sleep.