It might be time to sell my house!

I think I'm recovering from a panic attack.

When I got done from church and my regular post-church meal, I decided that it was high time for me to work on my front flower bed. After all, it was looking really ghetto--moreso than the houses around me. My goal was to weed it, trim up the bushes that had died back a little in the winter, and get it ready for a layer of weed barrier and some shrubs. My flower bed is an issue for me. I would love to sit and play in the dirt and make it pretty, but spiders live in flower beds and if you know me at all, you know of my very strained relationship with spiders.

So my prayer as I begin working in the flower bed is always, "Please protect me from the spiders and help me not to see any or come in contact with any and make them not be anywhere around me." Then every time I see something move out of the corner of my eye, I thank God that it's just a beetle or worm or something. It was working out rather well today. I had gotten about 3 feet of my flower bed weeded really well and hadn't seen anything other than worms and grubs and some beetles and ants. All was right with the world.

Then it started raining. I could tell that the rain wouldn't last long. It was just one little cloud. I was actually kind of enjoying it, but I figured I should get my little blanket I was sitting on (intended as a barrier between spiders and my butt) and take it inside until the rain was over. I was trying to find things that needed to be done to pass the time until I could finish the flower bed and saw that my little front porch had tons of cobwebs and dead bugs and stuff on it. So I started sweeping.

I saw a spider web in the corner by my front door and knew I was in trouble when the bugs I could see inside of it were the size of my thumb. Any spider eating bugs that big is bad ass! I knew I was in more trouble when I could see that the whole web was kind of writhing. I knew I was in even more trouble when I saw that there was a huge egg sac in the web.

I knew a few things for certain:

1. I probably didn't want to know what was behind that web.

2. I didn't want to do anything that would open that egg sac.

3. There were already several other spiders crawling around on the porch.

4. There was a new can of bug spray on top of the refrigerator.

5. I was going to have to pass very close to the web to get back in the house to get the bug spray.

I gathered my courage and got the bug spray. It looked like I was using a fire extinguisher or something. There was a white fog all over the front of my house.

I gave it time to settle, went and got my rake, and decided to unveil the miserable creature behind the web (carefully, without poking open the egg sac). Black widow. Unmistakably. I put on quite a show for my neighbors. I used approximately the rest of the can on the porch, front door, flower bed, basically anything that would sit still got a bath in bug spray. Then, not knowing if bug spray would be able to penetrate into the eggs and kill the baby ones, I soaked it again, picked it up with my rake, and threw it in the gutter.

I feel sick. How close was I to having hundreds of little black widow babies in my house? How many more of those bad boys are hanging out around my house?