Told the cat to behave himself while we were gone, kissed Matt goodbye on the front steps, put my purse and lunch in the backseat, and got into the car. As I settled into the seat, I felt a light strand of something on my hand.
Something you should know about me, if you don't already: I'm not actually an arachniphobe, but it's darn close. One of the irritating things about having long hair is that hairs don't just fall out and drift away on the breeze. They get caught on your clothes and wrapped around your arm. I used to panic when I felt hair on my hand or arm, because it feels very like a spiderweb strand, which would mean there was a spider nearby.
Of course, after years of being afraid of spiders and having long hair, one learns to check before flailing around like an idiot, because 99.9% of the time it's just a hair. I looked at my hand, ready to isolate and remove the offending loose strand.
Of course you can see it coming. I wouldn't be telling you this story if it were just a hair, would I? I get hairs on my arm five or six times a day; I don't fire up my browser and shoot off a letter to the notify list!
There was a long strand of web from the ornament on my rear-view mirror stretching down to my gearshift. I froze. Spiderwebs in and of themselves don't bother me except that the well-kept ones mean there's a spider nearby, and the abandoned ones look gross.
I definitely didn't have a spiderweb running from my rear-view mirror to my gearshift yesterday when I got out of the car. That meant that it had been built during the night.
The question now, was, of course: Where was its architect?
I looked at the web. It wasn't very big, and so I had hope that the spider, also, was small. I looked at my hand, my arm... Nothing crawling, though by this time every bit of my body that I couldn't see felt like it was crawling. I looked back at the web. Still no spider.
Maybe, I thought without much hope, it moved on already. Actually, the logical corner of my mind was groaning. If I didn't find that spider, I'd be jittery and nervous and watching for it instead of the road for the whole drive to work, and probably home again.
I reached into the back seat to get the towel I keep for wiping condensation off windows and covering the steering wheel when it's hot. I would clean away the web, and then worry about the spider. But as I turned back around, I saw it.
Now, certain people who will go unnamed are probably expecting me to tell you about the monster the size of my hand that breathed fire and made me swear to sacrifice my first-born child to it. Or something like that.
No, not Matt. Matt knows better. If I'd seen a spider any bigger than my thumbnail (or a black fuzzy one at all) I'd have teleported out of the car and come to make him deal with it. (He hadn't left yet, because my car was blocking his into the driveway.) And until he reads this journal entry, he doesn't know I dealt with a spider this morning.
I didn't even get a good look at it. It was a little brown dot on the panel under the hand brake. Intuitively I knew it was the spider, and I squashed it with the towel. It squished, and I cleaned up the little bit of goo with the towel, and then cleaned the web off my pewter dragons and my gearshift. Then I tossed the towel back into the back seat and got on with my day.
Aren't you proud of me?
(Oh, sweetie, would you remind me to wash the towel this weekend? Spiderbits give me the heebie jeebies.)
Word of the Day: concatenate - to link together in a series or chain
After a week-long dry spell, I started working on the Meade Hall story again last night. Braz hasn't answered any of my mail for about two weeks (yeah, I know, big surprise). I think, now that the excitement of it has worn off, he's losing interest (or at least initiative) in writing, and his lack of response generated one in me. But it started talking to me again yesterday (or maybe that was the caffeine overdose from six cups of iced tea) and I started working again.
The problem is, of course, that I don't actually know if Braz is going to drop out of writing this thing or not. I didn't want to make changes to our "uber-document", so I took about an hour and concatenated the three different outlines we'd put together and pasted in some notes, and started working from there. I did send the two pages of new material I wrote to Braz, since they were from the points of view of a couple of his characters, but I've decided in this second document, I'm not going to let waiting for his approval hold me back. If he ever gets around to reading it, we can copy it into the official version, but in the meantime, I still have the writing bug.
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