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The nice folks doing the pack-out are here, which means they've been moving through the house like a very tidy cyclone packing everything up and sticking it in the giant 16ft storage cube parked on our front lawn for the duration. I appreciate this intensely, since packing and moving usually inspire in me an unending and completely overwhelmed state of panic. (I am usually about half a step up from useless when moving things until everything is in boxes. Unpacking is fine, moving things once packed is fine, packing is the special hell.)
Everything was progressing just about perfectly until there was a sudden, horrified scream and a yell, which summoned me from my grading cave in the corner.
As it turned out, the poor woman wrapping up M's desk had reached up to add her shells to the box and suddenly felt mild hair... which turned out to be the tarantula moult M keeps from her curly-haired tarantula daughter, Charlotte. A moult I had thought this morning was a) was somewhere in M's "please keep inside, temperature-sensitive" hoard of delicate things by her bed in the living room and b) was living in a little cardboard coffin.*
For those of you who have never seen one, a complete tarantula moult looks more or less exactly the same as a live tarantula, at least if you cover up the part where the spider has exploded its way out of the old exoskeleton. The poor woman packing screamed, her supervisor (apparently terrified of spiders) screamed, her colleagues inspected the exoskeleton with much suspicion and side-eyeing, and then I tucked it away on my windowsill so that M can have it back when she gets home from the pawnshop.
I'm very glad that Charlotte was relocated to our friend P's on Saturday for her own health and safety during the post-flood remediations--not least because I was then able to reassure the nice packout folks that no, there were absolutely no live tarantulas in the house, just the cats, dog, fish and shrimp. Oof.
*M is a perky little bubblegum goth who feels this is the optimal way to store things like that. The coffin is, as I recall, a sort of pastel yellow.
Everything was progressing just about perfectly until there was a sudden, horrified scream and a yell, which summoned me from my grading cave in the corner.
As it turned out, the poor woman wrapping up M's desk had reached up to add her shells to the box and suddenly felt mild hair... which turned out to be the tarantula moult M keeps from her curly-haired tarantula daughter, Charlotte. A moult I had thought this morning was a) was somewhere in M's "please keep inside, temperature-sensitive" hoard of delicate things by her bed in the living room and b) was living in a little cardboard coffin.*
For those of you who have never seen one, a complete tarantula moult looks more or less exactly the same as a live tarantula, at least if you cover up the part where the spider has exploded its way out of the old exoskeleton. The poor woman packing screamed, her supervisor (apparently terrified of spiders) screamed, her colleagues inspected the exoskeleton with much suspicion and side-eyeing, and then I tucked it away on my windowsill so that M can have it back when she gets home from the pawnshop.
I'm very glad that Charlotte was relocated to our friend P's on Saturday for her own health and safety during the post-flood remediations--not least because I was then able to reassure the nice packout folks that no, there were absolutely no live tarantulas in the house, just the cats, dog, fish and shrimp. Oof.
*M is a perky little bubblegum goth who feels this is the optimal way to store things like that. The coffin is, as I recall, a sort of pastel yellow.
