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Saturday 29 December 2001
It's our first roasty toasty real summer
day for this year. While there is a little lull between work
and work I was thinking I should clean the house a little
today - or at least rotate some of the various piles of things
to keep that are stacking in every corner and on every table
top. I started on my study yesterday - not out of cleaning
enthusiasm but because I had an insect incident. A huge centipede
was hanging about on the wall above my desk, wiggling its
many many legs and sucking on its antennae. I stopped and
watched it for a while, terrified, attempting to plan my next
move... but before I had worked up the courage to capture
it in a glass it fell from a great height and landed with
a thin plop on my desk and disappeared down and out of sight
amongst all the pieces of paper, photos, books, jars of brushes
and pens. So I went to work flicking all the stuff carefully
off my desk with a long ruler, expecting to find it and all
its wrigglyness under each and every piece of junk. I got
very good at going "ok, ok... oooooowww (flick) phew!".
Once the entire inventory of my desktop
was strewn about on the floor, I discovered him on the wall
just behind my computer tower under the desk. I caught it
in a glass and transported it outside where it will be much
happier under a pot plant or something.
Why is it that all things wriggly give
me the heebee geebees now? They never used to when I was a
little kid. I could go to sleep with a large huntsman spider
on my wall and it would never even occur to me that the thing
covered in eyes and hair could take a trip over my face in
the dark in the middle of the night.
I remember staying with some friends who
lived up in the bug-infested Adelaide Hills and I was woken
in the middle of the night by one of the kids shrieking hysterically
in terror because a moth was flapping lazily around his room.
Granted, it was a pretty big moth, but I remember thinking
that it was really weird that it scared him that much.
We were completely used to bee stings, mozzie bites, spiders
clumping around on the ceiling, slater beetles under every
stone, leeches in Brown Hill Creek, worms wiggling in our
palms, millipedes, crickets, ticks and even the occasional
redback spider in the shed (which was well worth a little
fear). But these days a centipede on my wall has me instant
messaging Big-P "come home immediately! PLEASE! There
is a HUGE creepy CENTIPEDE on my wall... what do I do?"...
so when did I get so damn wussy?
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