Mice, Spiders and Housemates

I used to recently have a housemate from somewhere in the vicinity of a mythical place called hell. She would do funny things like stop the washing machine while your clothes were washing and tell you how terribly inconvenient it would be for her if you wouldn’t make the payment for an advertisement when you have just told her that you have lost your wallet and credit card and all your keys and most of your ids. But while she never emptied the dish washer, and talked to you like she was interrogating you or something, she didn’t ever block your car on the driveway and she would lend you her clothes hanger which was sitting in the storage – so I’d say somewhere in the vicinity of hell.

Oh, and she did this really annoying thing recently, in fact, did it during the time they were showing my room to prospective housemates. The room, which is completely disconnected to the house, is behind the garage and next to a reasonable sized backyard. This meant that I’d have occasional visits from the friendly neighbourhood mouse and its friends. My obvious reaction to the mouse was of course standing up on my bed and screaming on a long distance call to my parents who are in another country – but mice are intelligent beings (remember 42?) and when they find a female standing on the bed and screaming they take a very zen-ist view of the whole situation. Their first idea is to go the pocket of your back pack, but when they find that it doesn’t have a calming effect they were hoping for, they simply excuse themselves. Anyway, I digress. Coming back to the story, my housemate decided that it will be far more convenient to simply leave the door open and let people walk in and out – while she, reasonably, kept an eye on them. I didn’t mind much to the people bit, I don’t really possess many steal-worthy things, but I definitely wasn’t going to let the door stay open and thus give the mouse and its friends a chance to test if my opinions of sharing my bedroom with them had changed. I told her as much, and as I soon found out, not to much useful consequence.

I return home, a bit later than 10’o clock at night, to find on my pillow, a spider about 3 inches in diameter. Cursing my housemate, poor and tired me starts thinking of ways to get rid of the spider. My first plan, and I simply repeat for education, was to make a path for the spider leading to the outside and throw things at it to motivate it to move. That didn’t work. Spiders are stupid and when you throw things at them they play dead. Well, this made things difficult for me, because I had to pick those things from the top of the spider – so you can imagine my hand was within a centimetre of the spider and therefore obviously, while I was doing this I was also screaming. Anyway, I have another house mate, who is petrified of spiders and that is even when they are outside and not very large. So, while I could hardly expect her to help me, I was quite sure she would have a spider killer spray. I must mention, again for education, that while they have their use, the insect killers are quite horrible things, the death they make looks very ugly and painful. Anyway, I decide to use the insect killer and what that does is make the spider move very quickly to whatever direction would take it’s fancy or panic. Unfortunately, the direction our spider took was on a pair jeans which were lying on top a lot of bed-sheets on the clothes hanger. As it climbed on this specific pair of jeans, I started to really panic, I didn’t want to spray insect killer on a pile of clean and ironed sheets and doona covers, and I couldn’t imagine anything worse than trying to find a 3 inch spider in a stack of sheets. So, obviously, I was screaming, this time on the phone to a friend who is interstate, that 'it was climbing on my jeans'.

At this point comes my housemate (the cause of all the trouble and a total pain) she stands at the house door, which is opposite the garage door, to which my room is connected (remember, my room is connected to the garage?) and screams as accusingly as ever, “what is going on?” I get off the phone for a sec and reply to her that there is a spider in my room, to which, she replies, “You are screaming because there is a spider in your room, get over it and shut up” or something in the similar vein. Now that is a bit rich, I mean, sorry to disturb your sleep but I have a spider in my room because you wouldn’t leave door closed and now I am dealing with it by myself, sorry I am going to be as loud or as quiet as I like. I think I told her something on the lines, nothing very eloquent, I was absolutely fuming. We banged doors on each other and I sprayed on some more insect killer and the poor thing died before it had gone much further.

The next day, I am catching up with the other house mate, and she casually asks me what happened the previous night, “I heard some doors banging while I was taking on the phone”. I lived in a kind of house where the natural place to find a person was in their bed room – and at 11 o clock at night, I think that is only natural. I tell her the story I have just told you, and she goes, “Oooh, right. Yes, so I heard the doors banging I came out to see what was going on. And C, she comes wrapped up in a towel absolutely fuming and tells me – You know Neha she is absolutely mad, screaming because there is a fucking spider in her room, and I thought she was getting murdered or something.” C, I found out, was self- tanning when she heard me screaming. At first, she wondered if there is anything she needed to do (or if, at least in her opinion, I was being my normal mad self), but by the time I was yelling, “it is climbing my jeans”, she decided my needs were greater than her tanning needs and she wrapped herself in a towel and jumped to rescue.

Ah imagine someone standing in the backdoor in a towel at 11 at night. Next day I saw her walking in after a late evening, she was wearing pants, I don't know about you but I would think if you are up till nearly midnight tanning, you wouldn't be wearing pants the next day, would you?

:)

Ah, well, from the vicinity of hell as I said.