worms, et al.

(life-size worm from my garden this morning.)

i'm not afraid of many things, but snakes and snake-like creatures freak the hell out of me. last week i came face-to-face with public enemy number one: an anaconda. now, i haven't seen the movie because it would most certainly cause sudden death. my fear of anacondas began when i first received this photo in an email. seeing it again makes me want to vomit and climb up on the counter. i once had to leave a classroom, because the principal brought in a garter snake to slither around the floor.

in hawaii, i was unable to snorkel to depths greater than three feet in the world-famous reefer madness as there were bright yellow eels swimming around. i loudly screamed through my blow-tube.

now you must be thinking that i am quite a sissy, but actually i am quite tough. i am proud to say that i am the spider killer of the house and i enjoy trapping the hairy ones in jars to see how long they will survive without air, food or water. (after six months i finally killed one prisoner because the idea of something so powerful living in a jar was interrupting my sleep.)

ahh spiders. if i don't trap them, i squeeze them in a napkin until they make a loud pop. it's quite refreshing to know that they're not coming back. hey! did anyone ever see that episode of 'charlie & lola' where that spider keeps crawling up the drain into their sink? nasty.

okay, so this thing was on my wall last week. what the hell is it? vicious, i'm sure. i popped it.

and now the worms. i've never been a fan of worms. they smell. they're ugly and they are near-impossible to dissect. (and why did we always have to dissect the foot-long freaks of nature? gross.) okay, anyway, worms are really nasty to me. perhaps it would have been beneficial at some point to hang out with some upper-el kids who though that "like, worms are, like, so sweet, you know?" instead of me and all of the first-graders in tights and patent leather shoes gagging when the boys stick them in our faces.

and it probably didn't help that my supposed best-friends used to peel the dead worms off of the track and throw them at me while i was running back in junior high. so today, while out in my garden, i came across the biggest earthworm that i have ever seen. not the longest, but definitely the fattest. and it grossed me out. but i took that photo just to face my fears. last week a snake, this week an earthworm. hey man, it's progress.