That's Mr. Bubbles to you

I've got about seven things that I want to write about, and try as I might (yes, I am eighty-seven, thank you) I can't seem to find the time to actually sit down and write about them.  If there was a device that allowed me to speak into the computer, I'd be as prolific as Steven King.  And that was kind of a stupid analogy.

First, after writing about my misadventures at the car wash, there seem to be a lot of people worried about my well-being.  I'd like to reassure everyone that I don't own any weapons, and I rarely try to do anything more technical than change a light bulb.  I've had some worthy comments as well.  My brother wants there to be a life preserver in any car I drive, and a friend of mine has threatened to refer to me henceforth solely as "Bubbles."  Good stuff.  I know the same type of stuff happens to almost everyone.  I'm just the one dumb enough to talk about it.

Next: lived through the scariest thunderstorm of my life last Friday.  If I were a picture taker, I'd put up a photo of the horizon at 5:30 PM, but I realize this isn't necessary.  You can experience the same thing by going into the nearest closet, shutting the door, and closing your eyes.  I've seen brighter skies at 3 AM.  You know how in really bad B movies they show the sky churning when bad things are about to happen?  Well, let's just say that I expected Thor to come down from his virtual Viking ship and flatten all the trees in order to capture Mistress Rhododendron.  I even spent twenty minutes in the basement, cowering like, well, cowering like me.  Sirens and a pitch black sky during evening rush hour is enough to convince me that I might be in a little danger.  Later that night, and all through Saturday (until it started to rain again) the dulcid sound of chain saws filled our house.  We went for a walk last night, and we saw a lot of broken trees and busted branches, three days after people were able to clean up.  It was intense.

Continuing: we have a kitten, Sligo, that has been with us for about two months.  He is not a cat.  He is a monkey.  I don't know what they call baby monkeys, but we call ours "Sligo."  He has a tail long enough to hang from a tree, if we had any trees indoors.  He loves water (he is so not a cat), and if we do not close the lid to the toilets he will drink from them.  When he sits, he rest on his backside, leaving his front paws hanging in the air.  He looks like a prairie dog.  Or a gopher.  He won't eat food out of a bowl.  He will only eat it if he first tips the bowl over, and then he pounces on each individual piece as if it were a mouse.  When we try to open the backdoor to the deck we first have to remove the pieces of food that have clogged the track that the door sits on.  He bites our feet in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.  He howls when I try to clean out the litter box.  He is driving us insane, and we think, purely because of him, that we are now ready to have children.

We also have another pet, though I prefer to think of him as a mascot.  His name is Bruno.  He is a spider.  A massive, massive spider.  Bruno came to town two weeks or so ago.  I noticed him in the middle of a web that he built that extends from the flower boxes on our deck to the boxes on our neighbor.  Bruno is the size of Winnipeg.  There is nothing more in this world that creeps me out more than spiders (not even Bush family reunions).  If I see one inside our house, I immediately freeze and look for escape routes.  A spider the size of a housefly is able to paralyze me for half an hour.  If I were to be sitting on the couch, minding my own business, and a spider the size of Bruno crawled up my arm, I would die.  Instantly.  My heart would explode.  And yet, I haven't had the urge to whack Bruno.  Mostly, it's because I don't believe that I am strong enough to kill him.  I have seen him eating spinach.  Bruno is one resilient mother-spider; his web has been destroyed by weather three times in the last week.  First by a very windy night, then by the aforementioned near tornado, and lastly by a drenching storm on Saturday.  Every time his web has disappeared, I have thought that was the end of Bruno.  Ha!  He comes back, stronger each time.  Yesterday I watched in horror/awe as he spent ten minutes spinning an insect that got caught up in his web into lunch.  I'm sure that since I started writing about him that he has tripled in size.  I have seen automobiles smaller than this spider.  I try to stay rational.  All Bruno is doing is feeding on insects that would otherwise threaten to come inside our house as the weather gets colder, but then I wonder what Bruno will do once the weather gets colder.  I hope he dies, naturally and with no pain, but I sometimes lie awake at night thinking about the prospect that he might try to venture inside.  If he does, he will eat his meals at the kitchen table and commander the television at night.  I will be helpless to stop him.  And what if Bruno is really Bruna?  His/her thorax has been getting bigger.  What if Bruno/a is getting ready to unleash an egg sac of doom?  I close my eyes and I see the apocalypse.  It has eight legs and moves really, really fast.