The fates hate me, but the bugs? They love me.

My desktop computer decided to crash today. My LIFE is on that thing. Our budget stuff, all our photos, my business records, invoice blanks, my pricing sheets, everything! I have also written over 30 songs (and a few I've recorded) and all those files are on there too. *sniff*

I can't access ANYTHING at the moment. We're pretty sure the hard drive is fine, it's bad memory and something else that's not working (and I do have backups of some stuff)- but ugh ugh ugh, I feel like my entire life is on hold. Thank goodness I bought a laptop earlier this year, or else I wouldn't even be able to function, but it's not my main computer and I want my main computer. My laptop also hates my printer, and I had 4 orders I needed to get out this morning, and I needed my invoice file and I needed to print that and labels for my packages. Thankfully I was able to download a driver that seemed to make it work. But...

WAAAAAAAHHHH!!!! What a HUGE pain in the rear (and checkbook).

My hubby and dad can both build computers, but they're saying with the parts we need to replace, I might as well just call Dell and buy a whole new one. *big, huge, loud sigh*

Bye-bye swanky, new camera that I wanted to get as my Christmas present to myself. I swear, the fates are keeping me from that thing!

I had a visitor this morning. I guess it's a praying mantis. I have an uncle that is terrified of those things. This one was tan and skinny. I thought they were green and a little bigger. Don't worry, I didn't lysol him. I had pity and captured him in a cup and released him on the back porch for the huge frog-sized red wasps to carry him away. Life is so interesting living in front of a large open field in Texas.

Did you know they fly? I didn't. But I do now.

Only in Texas

Only in Texas can you walk out on your back porch and see a gigantic spider the size of a toad, then turn around and see a baby toad the size of a small spider... then run back inside to grab your camera only to return just in time to watch a large red wasp drag the huge toad-sized spider across your porch to heaven only knows where.

This baby toad was the size of my thumbnail:





I've never seen a tarantula here before, nor have I seen a huge red wasp... much less a huge red wasp dragging a tarantula!

My life has never felt so bizarre.

Spiders and tigers and bears, oh my!

A few minutes ago, I noticed my good dog pawing at something over against the wall. Knowing the habit of the neighborhood scorpions to decide to infiltrate our humble abode, I figured I should check it out. Much to my relief, it was not a scorpion, just a spider. Now, I'm not fond of spiders, but knowing that most of them aren't a danger makes me not freak out over one anymore. (Yes, I know that Texas scorpions aren't a danger either, but come on. They're just freaky and scary anyway!)

I leaned in to see what kind of spider it was (we get these totally harmless but incredibly dangerous looking black ones with red back marks!), and I couldn't tell, but I did notice that its butt was kind of bumpy. I wasn't thinking about this fact very clearly (I am tired... it is 2am, after all, and I wanted to go to bed an hour ago but was too riveted by a google search on what can make for cloudy urine -- yes, I'm that much of a nerd) and decided to just kill it.

My husband is not here tonight, so there weren't any big shoes around. I wear a size 5 shoe and when it comes to spider squishing, I'm a firm believer in the bigger the better. We don't have any bug spray, so I decide Lysol is a safe bet. That stuff will kill anything. So I spray it with Lysol, and of course, it freaks out and slows down enough for me to feel secure in squishing it with a smaller-type shoe. So I squish it, but it's a very determined little bugger and it does NOT want to die. I squish it 4 more times before it dies. It's then that I realize that there are little moving things all across where the spider had crawled in its final moments. What were these little moving things, you ask? Well, at first glance, I thought they were ants. We're always battling ants in Texas. I'll tell you right now, they were not ants. They were little baby spiders that I guess jumped off of big momma's butt when I started inundating them with poison. Little baby spiders. A TON of little baby spiders. Crawling on my floor. Probably jumping on my head, running up my nose, and trying to eat my brain. I think that portion of the carpet is now completely disinfected for life. And there are who knows how many dead and disinfected baby spiders now sitting in my vacuum cleaner. I love Lysol.

I haven't stopped feeling little things crawling all over me since. I'm not sure I'll get much sleep tonight. I'm completely skeeved out! Like I said, I'm generally okay with most spiders... and I will leave them alone to live their happy spidery little lives if they're outside. But they aren't allowed to survive if they breach my doorway... especially carrying little babies on their butts!

*shudders*