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Saturday, August 29, 2015

You die in seconds

Australian drop bear
I had to go to Petco today to buy another dog bed for downstairs. Just to clear up any confusion – at night  Georgia sleeps upstairs in our bedroom in a bed which is inside a dog crate.

Downstairs she sleeps in another dog bed – which is exactly the same as the one upstairs. Except that now Sissi has decided that Georgia is harmless – and probably a bit dim – she has started sleeping in Georgia’s bed downstairs.

So that Georgia does not have to sleep on the floor I have bought another bed – exactly the same as the other two – to put in the kitchen for Georgia.

The people who make the beds are probably at this very moment putting on extra staff to cope with the demand.

We have had web worms in our mulberry tree. I had never heard of web worms until we saw the nests and looked them up on Google. They may or may not do any harm to the tree – there is some uncertainty about this – but in any event they make monster webs and it  looks like giant spiders live in our tree - and I just cannot deal with spiders.

I have never been the same since I was about five years old and my brother was chasing a large huntsman spider around the ceiling with a broom. He knocked it off the ceiling and it fell down the front of my shirt. This was a scarifying and unforgettable experience.

Lenny also has arachnophobia – possibly from the time when he was much younger and I asked him to clean the spider webs off the windows – and then clean the windows.  He used three cans of spider killer – so the spiders sort of drowned rather than being poisoned –and the area around that house is still a dead zone without bugs or spiders or any other living thing.

Anyway since then he has been very wary of spiders – which is good in Australia because we have spiders the size of kittens that can jump 10 feet and bury their fangs in your eyes.

The good part is that you die in seconds.

I was reading something on the Internet the other day and it listed all the venomous creatures in Australia – and there are a lot of them. Snakes, spiders, jelly fish, Irukandji, sharks, crocodiles, bunyips, drop bears, giant kangaroos that can disembowel you with one stroke of their massive paws -  and the list goes on.

In Vienna the most dangerous creature was a hedgehog. In Indianapolis it is a squirrel.

Of course around here the most common form of death is gunshot but I have read the statistics and have found that most homicides are carried out by family members.

Which is why I will not let my family visit me in Indianapolis  - and I keep a close eye on Cate.

6 comments:

  1. Thank you for the first laugh of my day :)

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  2. I don't have a fear of spiders. Most of the time I capture them with a glass and saucer and then transport tem outside. I was scared by a horse at an early age so I still feel uncomfortable around them, but at the same time I do appreciate them for other people and I realize that they could love their horse just as much as I love my dog.

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  3. I am totally with you on the spider thing. If a huntsman, large or small, fell down the front of my shirt I would die of terror.

    We have very few venomous critters in NZ, and two of those are imports from Oz ( the redback and white-tailed spiders). None of them are deadly.

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  4. I'd like to have seen the spider dance you must have done that day when you were 5. I'll bet there are a lot of siblings behind those gunshot deaths...

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  5. Ditto on the spiders, I kill mine with hairspray-kinda glue them up. We are getting a coyote thing going, so, so far the deadly birds, mosquitos, bald eagles, rats and coyotes. We seem quite prairie like for the big city. Oh, and I forgot the packs of wild dogs.

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  6. SK Waller: My pleasure

    esb: I can understand horses. Cate grew up with horses and cows - and dogs.

    Alexia: See and you thought we had done nothing for you.

    Sandy: To this day I am very good at getting shirts off.

    fmc: There os no wildlife around here apart from the squirrels and a couple of wild bunnies. I guess there are rats but we have not seen them

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