Thursday Thirteen

1. A spider built an entire town inside my sneakers that I use for my "outside shoes." When I went to put them on, there was spider web everywhere, inside and out. The spider was still in the shoe. I handed it to my husband. "Eww," I said. He cleaned it out with a paper towel.

2. The spider in my shoe reminded me of that nursery rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do. I think she whipped them all soundly and put them to bed, but it's been a long time since I looked at nursery rhymes.

3. I used to have a book of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. It was large with a black and white checked pattern on it, and goose in a bonnet on the front. At one point, I knew all the nursery rhymes, but that was a very long time ago.

4. Was there a nursery rhyme about a spider? I don't recall one, but I remember the song, "Itsy Bitsy Spider." That spider had a Sisyphus complex, always climbing up the water drain only to be washed out and having to start all over again.

5.  Once, I opened a game camera in the kitchen and tiny little yellow spiders went everywhere. It looked like there were hundreds of them in the innards of the game camera. The next fall, we had big spiders - we call them wolf spiders although I don't think that's the right name - were all over the house. I was constantly hauling out the vacuum to suck them up off the floor. They appeared every fall for years after, and I even saw one this year. But hopefully they've about done their due in the house.

6. Now I only open game cameras outside when I want to get the cards out to see what the pictures are. Yes, I buy only cheap game cameras, not the ones with apps that allow you to see in real time that there's a raccoon in the backyard.

7. Speaking of raccoons, I saw a story Wednesday about a raccoon in Hanover County, VA, that invaded an ABC store. It destroyed bottles on the lower shelves, got very drunk, and passed out in the bathroom. The animal was fine after it sobered up.

8. I once had a squirrel find its way into the garage. Its ending was not as good as the raccoon's. This was when my husband had ankle surgery in 2019, and I was caring for him and not going out much. I don't know how the squirrel got in the garage. I heard something once when I was in the laundry room but I thought it was the dryer bumping against the wall. After several days, I had to make a grocery store run. While I was gone, the mail carrier brought something up to the house, and my husband, on his little knee scooter, asked the woman if she could just put the delivery inside the garage door for me to get when I returned. "Do you know there's a dead squirrel in your garage?" the woman asked him after she put the parcel inside. He did not. Being the hero that he is, he wheeled himself outside in the cold, down the patio sidewalk, and into the garage, found a shovel, picked up the dead squirrel, and flung it as far as he could out into the yard so I wouldn't drive home to find a dead squirrel in my path. "I didn't want to freak you out," he said. He later had a friend remove the carcass away from the house. He was probably right that a dead squirrel would have had me in tears. It upset me anyway because I knew the poor thing died of dehydration and lack of food.

9. Completely changing the subject now, I gave ChatGPT all of my health issues, food allergies, food preferences, and what I normally eat, and said, "fix me." We are working on a few things, and I have lost three pounds, even over Thanksgiving. I'll let you know if this continues to prove helpful. So far it seems to be working. I don't know why I thought to do that, but I guess dietitian could be another job that AI takes over.

10. My friend told me she read that the owner of Open AI thinks that one day an AI will be president. I'm not sure I want to live in that world. That's just too weird even for me. Although I think AI is better than believing that all the powerful folks at the top are secretly lizard people.

11. We had a lizard called a skink in the back and it kept trying to get in the house. I didn't want to kill it, I just wanted it to move along, so I sprinkled black pepper all over the patio door and the patio area where I kept seeing it. Black pepper is supposed to be something skinks don't like. The skink moved to the front porch, which is Ok because I don't go out that door as much and there aren't little door guides for it to hide under.

12. I tried using cayenne pepper to keep the deer away from my roses when I grew them, but it didn't stop them. Nothing keeps those things from eating the flowers, although they don't like marigolds much. I even had them eat my mums this year, which was a first.

13. And now we have come to the end of this wayward little wandering Thursday Thirteen. I don't often do these like this but sometimes it's good to just see what comes out of the air when I simply want to write.

Thank you for reading!

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 936th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.