Posted on 08/05/2017 7:41:35 PM PDT by ETL
Funny you should put it that way. That cabin in NM I lived in was bi-level. I had one Aladdin kerosene lamp and that usually stayed on the lower level. Too precious to carry around like a flashlight. So a trip to the kitchen was with a flashlight.
One night I went up the kitchen w/flashlight for something. As I walked in from the hallway I noticed something on the wall to my right under an old poster that didn’t lie flat on the wall. There was a spider bigger than the typical tarantula and it was black and white. Like alternating colors on its legs. I’ve never seen a pic of a spider like that so I don’t know what it was. Hairy as heck.
I turned on my heel, went back to the living room and forgot about whatever it was I went to the kitchen for. I wasn’t that hungry! lol
Never saw it again even though I searched thoroughly in the light of the next day.
From Mark Twain’s “Roughing It”:
“The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish.
If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy?—proud? Indeed, they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress.
There was as usual a furious “zephyr” blowing the first night of the brigade’s return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch. There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bedrows. In the midst of the turmoil, Bob H—— sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted:
‘Turn out, boys—the tarantulas is loose!’ “
I love that part. How would you like to hear that in the middle of the night? :-)
Twain’s “Roughing It” is one of my favorite books of all time. Hilarious and cogent “news and comment” on life in the old west.
You always end up noticing them in the outhouse at our cabin AFTER you’re committed... and good gawsh they are fast, they might be able to teleport short distances...
That going “all in” in the cephalopod world...
Omg, that was crazy funny...
Yes. It of course is a squid that the dopey cat had wrapped around its face. You know what they say about cats and curiosity...
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