May 21

Today Swistle posted about jumping spiders and grilled cheese, and I have some thoughts about both of those things.

I first noticed a jumping spider at the back door last week. I dropped the garbage can on top of it and left it until morning. (I did not mention to Elwood, before he moved the garbage can back to its usual spot, that he should watch out for jumping spiders. He did not get jumped on, but I still feel that I should have given him a heads-up.) Joe found a few of them in the basement while he was lifting weights. I found one in the bathtub. (I plunked the Comet can down on its head, but I forgot to warn Elwood about why the Comet can was in the bathtub the next morning -- are you noticing a theme here?)

I said I had some thoughts about the jumping spiders, but mostly those thoughts are EEK and also WHY? We don't usually have jumping spiders. Is it, like, a meta-plague -- a supplemental plague in plague-time, in case we were feeling insufficiently plagued? I believe that one plague at a time is more than enough. The Egyptian plagues sound extremely unpleasant but at least they were sequential and not simultaneous.

The jumping spiders are making it tricky for me to muster the motivation to sustain my "Pull-Up By 50" fitness regimen, which requires me to lie down on the basement floor. Joe said, "Mom, you should keep it going. I'll protect you from the jumping spiders." I said, "Do you mean that you will smite them or that you will say, 'Mom, you've been through childbirth five times; you can handle a spider'?" (What he actually meant was that he would find it amusing to say, "Hey, is that a spider?" when it was NOT a spider. Do the grownup ladies find that amusing? OF COURSE we do not.)

So: I vote no on jumping spiders. I also vote no on grilled cheese with mayo.

When I was a small girl I was an extreeeeeeeemely picky eater. I was embarrassed about my pickiness; I didn't like being picky. But I really couldn't help it. I still remember how awful onions tasted. It caused me genuine distress to put them in my mouth, much as I might feel about eating a live jumping spider these days. Going to restaurants was sometimes stressful, because the food was more expensive and I was expected to have my company manners on display. Once we were traveling through North Carolina and I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich at a restaurant. Grilled cheese had always been a safe choice in my experience, but something was deeply, badly, painfully wrong with this grilled cheese sandwich. It turns out that in North Carolina, many people think it is a special delicious treat to put mayonnaise inside a grilled cheese sandwich. At that point in my life I would probably have eaten spackle before I would have eaten mayonnaise. Even though I eat mayonnaise happily here at age 49, I had such a powerful unhappy response to that early 80s sandwich that I can't even hear the words "mayo" and "grilled cheese" together in a sentence without a shudder. Swistle's post was actually talking about mayo on the outside of a grilled cheese sandwich, but my "no" vote remains unchanged. No mayo on the grilled cheese, no jumping spiders in the house. End of discussion.

Comments

[mandamum]

I once shared a bedroom with a jumping spider. Its terrarium sat on top of our chest of drawers. The perfect model for my husband's arthropod macrophotography, it became a semi-famous jumping spider - we still have photos of him around the house and on t-shirts, and one won a prize. We fed it crickets (and once, accidentally, another jumping spider).

(Assuming you're talking about the same type of jumping spider I am - the small fuzzy ones that tend not to bite?)

Where we live now, there are too few, which makes several family members sad. Black widows and brown recluses and wolf spiders are less friendly and much less cute.

[Jody]

I won't comment on jumping spiders for fear of attracting them.

I think wolf spiders are fascinating, especially during the very brief moments when their babies are crowded onto their backs in seething masses. But brown recluses and black widows are indeed much less cute. (We had a recluse in our garage last spring, and I nearly put my hand on it before I saw it.)

Mayo on grilled cheese is disgusting. I've done olive oil in the pan for crisping instead, and that can work, but butter is the gold standard.

[Kellie]

Yikes, mayo *in* grilled cheese would have traumatized Young Me, too. I haven't tried it on the outside because people are often wrong when they tell me I can't taste the mayo in/on things, and though I dislike it less, I still don't love it. (My grilled-cheese pan-greaser of choice is bacon grease.)