News

I’ve written two blogs and I can’t post either of them. I over shared in both about different things. I’ll hit the highlights.
First, we learned yesterday that we have an infestation of Brown Recluse spiders. They are in the walls according to our exterminator, who made an emergency trip to look at the spider we had caught. All right, our friend Richard had caught the spiders in the guest room. He was manning the camera at the wolf howl. For some reason I always seem to forget to introduce him at an event where he’s working with us. Don’t know why, and he doesn’t mind. He’s the photographer who took my latest pictures that are on the books. He’s very good at what he does. Anyway, he had found several spiders in the house, and squished them. I could not identify anything from the remains. The last spider he bought intact was a wolf spider. Harmless, and okay to have in the house. But these two were not harmless, and not okay to have in the house.
We kept them for the exterminator to confirm, I mean spiders aren’t my primary area of biology now or ever. He confirmed what we’d learned from on-line pictures. Brown Recluse. We’ll be taking steps to do something with the problem, but I have to say I am unnerved by it.
I have an extra scene to put in A LICK OF FROST, that my editor and I both agree need to be there. I can’t seem to concentrate on it. You know how if you see a spider crawling on you, or step through a web, that you have the sensation that it’s still on you even when you know it’s not? Well, it’s sort of like that. I now know that we have all these dangerous spiders in the house, everywhere, and I feel like they are everywhere, even places I know they are not. I think I am seriously creeped. I feel like I’m wimping out. Jon says I’m not, that it’s normal. Sherry, our Chief of Domestic Operations, says I’m reacting normally. She is one of the most practical people I know, so I guess I am, but it still feels weak. I don’t’ like to feel weak. It makes me feel, well, weak.
I had one day of doing nineteen pages on the Jason book, then I got sick, and now we have an infestation of spiders that can cause rotting flesh eating sores to appear where they bite. I had an uncle that got bitten years ago. The bite went deep into the meat of his leg until you could glimpse the faintest gleam of bone. That memory is probably not helping steady my nerves. No, probably not.
I’d rather work on the Jason book if I was going to sit down, but it seems like every time I get going, some other responsibility interjects itself, and derails me. I feel quite derailed today. Like derailed by some giant spider sitting across my tracks. Brown recluse, why did it have to be brown recluse. You know I tried to make that last sentence sound funny, but it doesn’t sound funny. It just sounds like bad news.