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.