So. This morning I killed a spider. It troubled me deeply, but it had been in a lot of pain, and I just had to let it go. No, really, I got up at 4AM to let the cat out, and when I opened the door that leads from our apartment to the building's entryway, there was this enormous spider sitting in the entryway.

How enormous, you ask? Well, give me a second - it was four in the morning, after all, and I want to be completely objective about this. I think it was about a foot and a half across. No, really, it was about an inch and a half, maybe two. Of course I'm counting the legs! When you ask how tall a human is, you count the legs, don't you? When you measure the height of a horse, you count the legs! (Not the head, for reasons I'll never understand, but you do count the legs!) When I measure spiders, I count the legs! Anyway, this is pretty damn big for a spider in these parts. (At least, it's pretty big for the ones that crawl out from under their rocks.) It was raining, so I suspect the spider was just looking for someplace dry to hang out. It chose... Poorly.

Every now and then I am grateful for some of my health problems. For example, the fact that I have problems with my feet means that I slip on my shoes even at 4AM to let the cat out, and therefore I was not confronted with this spider while barefoot. (I was wearing orthopedic sandals, however, which meant my toes were exposed, and so things could have been better.) Anyway, it was just sitting there, so I was hoping I could lean way over to open the outside door and let the cat out, and then I would deal with the spider.

But no.

The cat, in its infinite, catty wisdom, sniffed the spider. This, as I'm sure you can understand, bothered the spider. I'm sure if I just ran into some cave to get out of the rain and a giant nose came down and snuffled at me, I'd do exactly what that spider did: Shriek hysterically and start running in circles. Well, okay, the spider didn't shriek (not that I could hear anyway, but I suppose it might have let out whatever noise spiders let out when they're awakened at 4AM by giant feline noses) but it did start running in circles. And the path of its circle was going to take it straight into my apartment.

This, as I'm sure you understand if you know me at all, is wrong.

So I stepped on it. It was all I could do. The poor thing was suicidal. And it was moving way too fast for me to even attempt to think of anything else. But what else could I have done? Slammed the door on it? That would have trapped my poor cat in the apartment building's entryway. Forever, possibly, because knowing that there was a hysterical spider the size of my fist (okay, the size of a 50-cent piece) lurking in the hallway waiting for me to come out so it could run across my feet with its little spidery legs... Nope. That door was not being opened again. So you see, it's all for the best that I stepped on it before I had time to think about it.

Having been brave enough to actually kill the spider, I then experienced my usual post-spider jitters, and I left it in the entryway and went back to bed, where I had the creepy-crawlies for half an hour or so before managing to fall asleep again. You know, that's one thing that bothers me about spiders. I stepped on the damn thing wearing inch-thick shoes, with a great deal of the force that my not-inconsiderable frame could muster. How come it didn't stay flat? Anything else I stepped on would have made a little buggy pancake, but the spider still managed to retain enough structural integrity to curl up into a ball. Why is that? (No, I do not want you to write me explaining; that was a rhetorical question, dammit!)

Its little carcass was still in the hallway when I let the cat back inside at 6. I stepped carefully around it (the thought of even a completely dead spider touching my skin gives me the heebie-jeebies) and opened the door for the cat. The cat stopped and sniffed at it again, but since it didn't offer an interesting reaction this time, Diamond shrugged (a very cat-like shrug, I assure you) and sauntered back into the apartment. And it was still there at 7:15, when Matt and I left for work. Matt agreed with me that it was an unusually large spider for our area, and carefully, with the edge of his shoe (and while I stood a safe distance away) flipped the spider's body out of the entryway and into the dirt. If he hadn't done that, I'd have had to step around it every time I went through the entryway for the next five days, until the stairwell was cleaned again.

My hero.