IN OTHER NEWS
I was definitely bitten by a creepy crawly night before last. At first I thought it was a skeeter. A damn big skeeter too, almost a centimeter wide. I felt a little nip that didn't hurt, and I caught a glimpse of it just as my hand was brushing the thing away. That was automatic, by the way. I didn't tell my hand to do that.
It didn't hurt, but dayum, it sure started to itch about ten minutes later, so I gave it a good skritchin'. The thing was, it was about 2:00 am and I was dismantling this old wooden pallet for to saw and shape and nail the boards of it into a jig for bracing an aluminum tube for bending, so as to not kink the aluminum.
Now though, I ain't so sure that was a skeeter what bit me, because skeeters don't do that, you know? They don't launch sneak attacks out of rotted up boards. And I ain't never seen a skeeter that was almost a half inch big, anyway. Also, it didn't just leave a skeeter bump, it left a WELT.
I never got a good look at the welt because it was dark, and also because I scratched the top half of it clean off at some point soon after I started skritchin' it, and after that it was just a bloody hole. So, my theory is that it was a fiddleback spider. They're painless bites, they itch, and they leave great big welts. I looked it up.
Also, apparently only about a third of fiddleback bites result in cell death, and since right now the place where I got bit is a scabbed over lump on my arm, I figure that spider venom must have just up and surrendered when the T-cells got there.
Brown recluse. I grew up in the boondocks, calling 'em fiddlebacks. That's what grandma called a brown recluse. A fiddleback spider.
No comments:
Post a Comment