*I apologize in advance to those who hate stories about killing insects and spiders.*

 Last night my mother asked if I'd like to sunbathe at the beach on Sunday. Of course I would! (I don't swim in the ocean but that's a topic for another day. I still love going to the beach though.) After what happened this morning, I would gladly be relaxing at the beach right now!

 Every morning when I wake up, my first stop is the bathroom. I go in there, do my business and realize the shower curtain is being attacked. We have three cats, one of whom really loves to sit in the shower so I wasn't worried about murders or anything. I did peek around the corner to confirm it was indeed our cat Nani. Except...she wasn't attacking the curtain because there was a loose thread or anything. No, she was attacking the HUGE spider crawling along the bottom edge of the curtain. I've never seen a spider that big and pray I never will again. At least, not in person. His body was the size of a quarter! I have no idea how he got in our house, let alone the shower, but I certainly wasn't willing to wait six hours for the cat to finally kill him. (Our cats love to sit there and play with the insect for hours beforehand which is usually okay, as there tiny little spiders and bugs and things.This guy was NOT little.) Being that he was in the shower area (though not quite where the water could reach him), I grabbed a cup full of water and started to try and drown him. (We have cups of water lying around the bathroom for our cats to drink out of and I was scared turning on the shower at the point would just make seek higher ground where it would've been harder to kill him.) I repeated the process of filling a cup with water and dumping it on him for the next 15-20 minutes. That huge bugger still didn't die!

 I was fooled at one point, when he hid in the corner, but Nani wasn't so sure. She was right--the spider was only pretending to be dead! I continued the process of dumping water on him, which didn't do anything but move him around the shower. He eventually wound up on top of the drain, and I turned on the shower head and aimed directly at him. It finally seems I've managed to turn the tables on this guy! I'm pretty certain he's dead now, the cat is fairly certain he's dead this time, but I still have my doubts. He tricked me before, remember? Seeing as how our bathtub and shower are not one and the same in this particular bathroom, I couldn't just wash him down the drain. (I'd have done that by this point in the story if I'd been able!) I needed to go to the kitchen and get some paper towels to remove his body. I went back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom, never actually getting the towels I needed. I was scared that the spider wasn't dead and was just doing a really good job of playing dead. I debated about asking my brother to get the spider with the paper towels, and eventually decided to do so. My brother came into the bathroom, looked at the spider and decided to get a shoe out of his closet to stomp on it. There! If he wasn't dead after all of that water-logging, he was certainly dead after my brother banged his shoe on top of him! It finally felt safe to leave the bathroom for good this time, without having to worry that the spider might not be dead and instead lurking in the many hiding spots insects have in our bathroom.

 I still left the bathroom shivering and creeped out by the whole experience. I was also very thankful that I had a brother to help out in this situation. I'm not sure what I'd have done without him.

*I know there are spiders that live in water, but how would one of those kind get in our house? We're not close enough to those water sources for it to make sense.

**Love how healing writing can be--I'm no longer shivering about how creepy that whole experience was!

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