Way back a month or so ago, I'd woken up at something like 5.30am with Anya and was trying to deal with the usual morning wrangle of change wriggly baby, watch excitable baby, feed grumpy cat, feed hungry baby, keep grumpy cat away from excitable baby, wash, rinse, repeat.
Popping into the bathroom to dispose of a heavy nappy, I saw a huge huntsman spider crouching in the sink. These critters are famous for having a bark that's worse than their bite: this one wasn't a big specimen, but it was not that much less than handspan-sized, with spindly hairy legs and a habit of jumping up about 20cm in the air when startled. Their bite, I'm told, isn't much worse than a bee sting; but they can be aggressive and I didn't really want the thing running around my early morning madhouse.
So I grab a rolled-up newspaper, screw up my nerve and advance on the bugger. Huntsmen move very fast and have a habit of coming into houses to scare the bejasus out of folk; anyone who's spent more than a year or so in Australia will have dealt with one and knows that, even with the best thought-out strategy, it's 50-50 whether you'll manage to trap or kill the thing. As I said, the bite isn't bad; but they're so creepy generally that you don't want to contemplate the consequences of missing.
So: spider pinpointed; arm goes back; all my force slams down on it, desperate not to miss or strike a partial blow. There's a little tinkling sound, and I look down to see the huntsman crumpled up amidst several shards of porcelain. It was squatting on what our odd-job man Raymond later tells me is the structurally weakest point of the sink. I've smashed the basin along with the spider.
Getting this fixed was a bit drawn out but Raymond finally did it yesterday, and the point of this story is that the whole thing, parts and labour included and cash in hand, cost just A$10 shy of A$500. Reminding me again that odd-job man isn't too shabby as a career option.
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