One time when I was driving on a freeway, a massive huntsman spider ran across the windscreen. Inside the car. A car going at 120km/hr* and being driven by me. To say that I went screaming down the freeway would be the quiet version of the story. Poor huntsman was so terrified it leapt across the car in a single bound and landed straight in my lap.
Sheer. bloody. terror.
I flicked it off to the floor and stomped on it many, many times. I did not break speed. I did not take my eyes off the road. I did not stop screaming.
I thought that was as bad as it could get, but I was wrong.
A little while ago I was driving over to my PIL's house a few suburbs away. I was busy yelling loudly at the
Tsunamis to get them to stop yelling loudly and my ankle was itchy. It was driving me nuts it was so itchy. Scratch, scratch went my left foot, trying to de-itch my right ankle. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
Sometimes an itch needs to be looked at. Itches feel less itchy after you look at them. So I looked.
Leech. Bloody leech.
Oh. my. god. If huntsmen give me the screaming fits, leeches just send me into catatonic shock.
We get a lot of leeches around our place. You see them with their funny little caterpillar crawl, humping along from here to there, doing whatever it is that leeches do when they are not busily sucking your blood and injecting you with their blood-letting poison. The Tsunamis yell 'Get the salt!' whenever they see one because I taught them that salt will get a leech off once upon a time and now they have to yell 'get the salt' every. single. time. That's kids for you.
'Get the salt,' I whimpered in the car that day. 'Get. the. saaaaalt.'
The Tsuanamis fortunately did not hear me over their general car yelling. Each lost in their own loud, annoying world.
'Right,' I said to myself. Right always seems like a good opener to a stern conversation with oneself. 'Right, just concentrate on the road, ignore the leech, get to PILs, get the salt.'
My eyes kept zapping down to the leech, ever growing.
I was torn between driving like a bat out of hell to the salt and driving very, very carefully like an old one. Just seeing it squirming around, a new extension to my ankle, made me want to crash the car and yell 'get it off, get it off, get it off'. But I'm a mum now. I can't go about crashing cars over leeches.
I've got to mum up and get on with the job.
I made it to the PILs. I raced screaming from the car 'get the salt, get the salt, get the salt' and burst into tears at the sight of my calm, Italian mother in law wondering what all the fuss was about. Oh, her kind eyes seemed to say, you massive, massive wimp. But she dutifully got the salt and we watched that massive leech die along with about 250mls of my precious A+.
Leeches, huh? Have you encounted one?
* For some reason, I can't drive 110km/hr. A sensible person would automatically drive 100km/hr so they were still under the legal limit. I am not sensible.
[Image via weheartit]