A few nights ago, I sat in bed watching television while Doug slept beside me. A dog sleeping horizontally while another dog slept diagonally over both adults AND the horizontal dog made movement impossible. The stillness of the evening was broken when a giant tarantula appeared on the overcrowded bed. No, it wasn’t a tarantula. It was a Brown Recluse. In my hypochondriac mind, all spiders are suspect of being Brown Recluses who will cause your flesh to rot away and leave a section of delicate bone exposed for other spiders to burrow inside and lay eggs. Okay, maybe it was just a daddy-long-legs spider. It’s still a horrible thing to have approaching you when you are pinned down by two large German Shepherds. I whisper screamed, “Spider!” A whisper scream is that voice you use when you are sitting at a funeral and you need Great Aunt Whats-Her-Name to capture one of your children who is escaping by crawling under the pews. At my hysterical spider announcement, Doug bolted out of bed to a standing position, kicking the smaller dog to the floor in the process. Doug morphed from Brock Sampson to Doctor Venture and collapsed on the concrete slab that is our bedroom floor. While Doug writhed on the floor in some sleep induced seizure, I stood up in the bed, flinging the blanket across the room and waking the bigger dog, who lazily rolled to the floor and went back to sleep. Doug stammered questions as he tried to gain control of his newly bruised body. “Where? What spider?” I danced from toe to toe on the bed, like a cartoon character who has seen a mouse. “It was on the bed! Get it!” I saw Arachnophobia and I know that spiders are relentless hunters of humans. “Wake me when you find it again.” Doug collapsed and resumed snoring in a single movement. I stomped all over the bed with a flashlight, searching for the multi-legged intruder. I followed this with several minutes of shaking and beating the blanket to remove anything holding on, planning to crawl in my ear while I slept. Eventually, I settled in bed with every edge of the blanket vacuum sealed under my body to prevent any creepy-crawlies from nesting in my hair. Blanketless, like cheese on a mousetrap, Doug stretched out peacefully and continued snoring.