Tap Water Is For Sissies

My husband is quite the fruit salad mixture of too much testosterone with too little fear. The little bit of fear he does have is surprisingly of toothpaste and not surprisingly of spiders.

I read a horror book once (okay, it might have been a Nancy Drew book, but sometimes her luncheon would get a bit carried away and I'm still a little unsure about the whole steamer trunk thing. It sounds an awful lot like what a ventriloquist dummy is carried around in.). Anyway, in one scene, the heroine was stuck in some basement-like cellar thing and there were spiders. I think three total, which was important because they were deadly. The scene played out very nicely over many, many pages, as the poor woman (did I mention she was tied up?) was trying to keep track of each and every one of those arachnid assassins and attempt to defeat them singlehandedly one by one.

Here's where it gets silly: We know that even trussed up like a turkey and stranded alone, those three spiders, no matter how deadly, shouldn't be life threateningly scary. I know, it's madness to think so, but I'll say it again: They are not a threat to us so long as we can still roll over on top of them. Spiders, in all their eight-legged monstrosity, are all (with the exception of the one in the last Lord of the Rings) SQUASHABLE by humans. They squish. They smash. They smush and probably even crunch, but it's still all fatal for them. So why do we continue to be so afraid that we'll even move to a different room just to not have one on the ceiling above us?

So here's where it gets interesting. While not afraid of toothpaste, I am VERY afraid of spiders, and I am even more afraid of what kind would be living in the spout of my faucet. I have seen one fall out once and now fully believe that if I don't see any elsewhere in my house, that's because they have discovered that colonizing somewhere in the depths of my plumbing is much more conducive to their fearful purpose. I can't even stand to wash my hair in a sink because what happens? Your face becomes eyeball level with that horribly creepy overflow hole of the sink, and you can't guard your hair from faucet falling spiders from above if you're also trying to avoid eyeball attacking critters from the front (and we won't even CONTEMPLATE the possibility of who can climb UP through the drain!).

I know I'm not alone in this fear, so I feel very safe among you all with this admission. What I do not feel safe with, however, is my husband's complete disregard for the ownership of the sinks by the spiders as he weekly, hourly, daily dunks his head under the faucet and drinks from it! I know, it's complete and utter madness, but he does it anyway. I know there are spiders in there. I know one will soon fall into his thirsty mouth and down his parched throat and set up some gastric spider headquarters. Then what am I left to do? I will have to kill him myself before he turns into some eight-legged freak himself, and somehow try to explain to the authorities that it was for his own good.