Halloween Meme: Axe Me these 13 Questions

Halloween is obviously the best day ever!  I can’t wait to see my three-year-old daughter running willy-nilly through our neighborhood in her cowgirl costume.  (If I’m lucky, maybe her mom will don a French Maid outfit.)  In honor of the festivities, I felt a burning desire to create a 13 question survey.  Here it is…feel free to answer it yourself if you like.  My fetching wife is doing it as well.

1.  What is the worst Halloween treat you’ve ever received while trick-or-treating?

A religious brochure addressing the evils of Halloween.  Also, homemade popcorn balls are not a good treat on this occasion.  Popcorn balls?  Seriously?  Sounds like a painful condition.

2.  What character from any horror film would you most like to play?

I’ll say Freddy Krueger because he has the best lines.  Who can forget, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.”

3.  Would you rather be a zombie, alien or psycho? (Why?)

I have to choose psycho because zombies and aliens usually don’t get to carry around axes or chainsaws.

4.  How many Halloween, Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street movies do you own on dvd combined?

Seven of them combined.  Looking forward to the Friday the 13th remake re-imaging due out Friday the 13th of February, 2009.

5.  What is the scariest movie you have ever seen?

I’m going with the original version of The Exorcist. Pretty disturbing…

"Hmm, that can't be good."

6.  Lamest Halloween costume you have seen?

I’m not going to count the t-shirt that says, “This is my costume.”  I think it has to be the kid in a weird green bug head thing.  (See my wife’s blog for the picture.)

7.  Favorite Halloween treat?

Full size Reese’s Cups.

8.  Friendly faced Jack-O-Lantern or scary one?

Scary one, please.

9.  Have you ever had nightmares about a scary movie character?

Yes, I have several times.  It has involved being chased through the woods by Jason Voorhees.  I think I usually get stuck in mud, too.

"You didn't think you could get away, did you?"

10.  Best thing about Halloween?

Hey, the trick-or-treaters running around is cute and great.  However, my answer here has to be the women dressed in risque costumes.  For the sake of clarity, I’ll include a picture example (not of the trick-or-treaters…we all know what that looks like.)

"Would you walk the plank for me, matey?"

11.  Strangest Halloween custom you’ve heard about?

People stealing/hurting people’s black cats.  That’s just wrong.

12.  Person in your family who most likes Halloween (not counting yourself)?

I’m working on my daughter and trying to instill the same excitement about Halloween, but for now I’ll go with a nephew of mine.

13.  Are you superstitious?  If so, name at least one superstition of yours.

Not especially, but I guess I am somewhat.  I really prefer odd numbers to even ones.

Face to Face with a Wolf Spider: Not Good

The following is a true story. I wish it were not, and I am risking my very manhood making it public, but it is true. When we moved into our house, we discovered it to be the shelter for a plethora of spiders. I believe this to be the result of two main factors: 1. It was a relatively new neighborhood and had previously been a field. 2. Our particular house was only about a year old when we bought it and had been vacant for a month or so due to the previous owner having to move for her job.

Many a spider had been enjoying the human-free environment, and when we moved in, it became a daily occurrence to have a standoff with one of the eight-leggers. Let me make this clear: I do not like seeing, hearing about, reading about, or having nightmares about spiders. I realize they do good things for us, such as kill unwanted pests, but I prefer they do that just outside of the house or in the crawlspace. Having said this, the majority of the spiders we came across were small and looked pretty harmless. Yeah, “most” but not “all.”

For those of you who are not aware of the wolf spider, think tarantula but smaller (not THAT much smaller, though). We had the misfortune of finding a couple of these suckers in our house the first couple of months. The story below is about the dark, early morning that we had our closest call with one of these things. (I’ll say this right now. I’m the type of person that does not really like to kill things, even flies, but…sorry PETA…I’m not letting large spiders run around in our house, nor am I likely to be able to stand trapping it and putting it outside).

My wife likes to work out. She does not often miss a day, not even on a holiday, not even when she has to get up in the extreme a.m. during the overtime hours of tax season (she’s an accountant). One dark, early morning, as I no doubt lay snoozing in bed, possibly having a dream that involved a deserted island and that main woman from Lost, I was startled awake by a frantic wife jumping into bed and yelling something about a big hairy spider on the floor of the closet. Upon gaining full comprehension, I learned that it was a wolf spider “the size of Texas” and that it was actually on top of her workout shirt, which was on the floor.

At this point, I’m thinking to myself, “That’s it. We have to move away. NOW.” It soon became clear that my beautiful wife expected me to do something about the spider. Subsequently, it became clear to her that I had no intention of going anywhere near our closet in the next 24 hours or so.

If you are a guy, or you know any guy, you’ll understand how brilliant her next move was. She calmly stated, “I can call my dad to come over and get it.” It took only seconds for the following thoughts to enter my mind: For the rest of my life, I’ll have to hear the story of how my wife had to wake her dad at 5 a.m. to come kill a spider while her husband hid under the covers. This is the dad who works a real man’s job and hunts. I’m the husband who likes to write and works in psychology. (I do play sports…I felt a real need to throw that in here).

At this point, I had no choice. I was going to have to face one of my worst fears. I slowly got up out of bed and peeked into the closet. There it was. It was big; it was gross; it was staring at me in a mocking fashion, it was basically saying, “I’m huge, and you’re a loser.” My pulse quickened, and I began to sweat. I started thinking maybe we SHOULD call her dad. Maybe we could just avoid all extended family functions in the future. No, that wouldn’t work. I knew I had to take care of the situation. With my wife clutching my back and looking over my shoulder, I picked up a shoe. I was suddenly wishing I had much bigger feet, maybe a size 50, but alas, I was stuck with a size 10. I approached the spider about as fast as a turtle approaches a rock. I walked (or was it that my wife pushed me) closer and closer. I was within a couple feet of the thing when my wife felt it prudent to scream, “It’s a wolf spider. They jump!” Adrenaline pumping, we both flew out of the closet. I nearly broke my arm on the doorway, but I didn’t care. I was sure the spider could do much worse things than that to me. Her screaming, and our running also caused the spider to take cover in the deep recesses of the closet. Once we regained the nerve to go back in, we were deeply saddened to learn that we were going to have to search for the spider.

After some tense shoe box moving, we finally found it in a corner. The whole “jumping” thing had thoroughly freaked me out, and I was no longer willing to go at the thing with a shoe. I was now armed with the extension arm of the vacuum cleaner. This way, I only had to get within a couple feet of the monster. I also was happy to avoid hearing any form of crunching sound that may have occurred if I used the shoe method. With a shaky hand, I turned on the vacuum and jabbed the extension arm toward the creature. After we sucked the thing up, (I think my wife screamed again at this point), we actually put the whole vacuum cleaner out in the garage, fearing that the thing might escape somehow. I believe it was out there for three days before I brought it back in.

So far, we have had no further (knock on wood) close encounters of the giant spider kind. I apologize in advance, but below is a picture link of one of these guys on top of someone’s hands, someone who is obviously very mentally ill.

Yuck

So You Think You’re a Locksmith…

(No toddlers were harmed in the making of this blog, but we were worried for awhile!)

Since it seems that many among us would watch any form of reality television, it is feasible that we will see a show called, So You Think You’re a Locksmith on the WB in the next season or two. If that does indeed happen, I have a nomination for the show. My nomination would be for an alleged locksmith who would provide comic relief (briefly) and would be kicked off Locksmith Island the first episode. I had the misfortune of dealing with this locksmith recently.

Backstory: My wife and I had a very unnerving toddler experience with our daughter recently. I was doing yard work (if you do not know me, picture a tank-top clad man ripped with abundant muscles; if you do know me, then you know better). My wife, who was suffering hunger pangs, came outside for about thirty seconds to check on my status so that we could soon proceed with our dinner carry-out plans. During said thirty seconds, our toddler, who was inside, turned the deadbolt on the door that my wife had exited. Much to our consternation, we quickly realized that we were locked out, and our toddler and all of our keys were locked in. (Okay, before you even have time to say it…yes, we should have had a spare key on the premises or with our neighbors and have now rectified that situation, but at the time we had instead given our overhead garage door code to our neighbors and usually did not lock the regular door from the garage to the house except when going to bed at night. That was the very door that our toddler locked. Additionally, my sister who lives a few miles away did have an extra key but was not reachable. We found out later that she was in a meeting with a customer and had therefore turned off her cell phone).

Back to the main point: After a short while of fruitless efforts with our neighbors, who are awesome, to either open one of our locked windows or coerce our child to turn the deadbolt the other way, we knew it was time to call a locksmith. We were pretty sure at this point that we sucked as parents and would have our parenting license revoked by social services. It was after regular business hours, of course, but we knew most locksmiths, if not all, would make emergency calls. Through the bad luck of the draw, we chose one from our neighbors’ yellow pages that was located pretty close by. I do not want to sound too petty so I will not even include the smaller details that made it obvious to us that we had called the worst locksmith in North America (I originally planned to say worst locksmith in the world but my attorney advised me that might be an overstatement. Apparently there is a much worse locksmith named Ned in Europe). I will only point out the highlights and leave it to the reader to decide if I am just a small, bitter man.

1. He was unable to follow my directions to find the correct house in the neighborhood but did locate us after driving past each and every other house in the subdivision. I was the one standing at the corner waving him in.
2. He was unable to budge any of the three (fairly standard) door locks on our house.
3. He stated the locks were too dry and asked if we had WD-40. Apparently his official locksmith van did not carry this rare substance. I did have it and gave it quickly to him. He never tried it, and in fact, seconds after I handed it to him said he was going to just drill through our lock and that we would have to replace it. (We agreed immediately as we just wanted to get to our toddler as quickly as possible).
4. He required cash only payment, and one of our aforementioned neighbors kindly made a run to the ATM. However, the locksmith, for lack of a more fitting title, did not have change, and our neighbor again quickly ran to the nearby convenience store and bought a drink in order to get change while my wife and I enjoyed our reunion with our child, who was unharmed.
5. He gave us advice about what to do in case of being locked out of our house by a completely different type of lock, which we DO NOT HAVE on our doors.

I joke about these things now, but I really do not want to sound too petty. Bottom line is that we had to get in the house, and we did. At the time, we ONLY cared about getting to our kid. It was after that we started thinking about the locksmithing events. I am sure that some doors are more difficult to open than others, but still, come on, man…