Ben and I were sitting on the couch, enjoying some wine, and watching Deep Space Nine, a rather engaging episode, the one where Sisko, Dax, Wharf, O’Brien, and Kira get trapped in a James Bond-inspired holodeck program due to a transporter accident, and Julian and Garak have to keep them from being deleted while their patterns are recovered. You know that one? It’s good! But right around the time that Sisko was enjoying being the bad guy and running Julian for a loop, and Garak was making a cutting yet witty comment, Ben said, “Oh god! A huntsman!”

Cue screeching record sounds. Ben pointed to the curtain hanging beside me and I glanced at it long enough to see a dark shape before I levitated across the room and it went out of view.

And get this, Ben goes to his computer immediately and tweets:

This is BEFORE locating said spider. He’s a modern boy. In his defense, he was at his computer to pause Deep Space Nine, because one must concentrate when searching for giant spider.

I’m not going to blame the wine for my reaction because, as Ben followed up with:

So, now, cue shrieking and headlamps and gingerly examining the large heavy curtains to determine that the spider has moved on, to places unknown.

Ben kept repeating, “but how did it get in??” and I kept repeating, “oh god oh god oh god.”

Both are valid statements, I think. We eventually located it behind the TV stand on the baseboard. The new challenge was capturing it. I resourcefully used the TV antenna to herd it and that only backfired a little bit when I herded it underneath the television and out of sight.

I ran to get a glass tumbler to capture it with, to which Ben’s response was, “what are you doing?! That’s not nearly big enough!” After a few attempts at gingerly trying to place the glass over the spider, and a few more shrieks and jumps because that thing is fast and kept teleporting to the other side of the room, I concluded Ben was right, rejected the ceramic bowl he was offering, and found the perfect spider-catching container: the clear plastic cheese dish.

I dumped our freshly grated parmesan into the proffered bowl, and used the handy cheese-dish-feature, the foot, to grip it steadily, and managed to capture the spider on the fourth or fifth try.

Transparency is key. How do you know you’ve really caught it? Are you going to lift it up and *check*?

Only at this point did I ask myself why I was freaking out so much. It was a huntsman, a spider that might give you a few puncture marks out of self-defense, but nothing more severe than that. It’s a lovely house-guest, really! They hunt cockroaches!

I’m sure part of it was the surprise, and even the somewhat pleasant feeling of an adrenaline rush in a safe situation, sort of like a rollarcoaster ride. But they’re the wrong shape to be loved by me, the wrong size, and they’re blazingly fast. And they come out of nowhere.

In the end, it wasn’t even that big. The one I found in a funnel web on a tree was bigger. But this is our home, our couch, and most definitely our curtain, and I think you’ll understand if we were wary and twitchy for the rest of the night.