We did go to Connecticut last week and the piece they filmed on my family airs today on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet - 9am on most Fox network affiliates. By the time you read this, you won't give a shit.
Connecticut was interesting because I know we filmed this thing and I was interviewed, but I don't quite remember anything other than drinking and playing Balderdash all night long with Jeremy, Kelly and my brother. It's probably because we did exactly that three nights in a row. All night, all the beers, Balderdash. I know the first night I threw back eight--starting with two Morettis at this terrible Italian joint that cost $80 for a bowl of a mediocre side dish that claimed to have truffle oil somewhere underneath all the nutmeg.
One of the three ten hour Balderdashathons ended in us at The Post Road Diner, where I devoured a gigantic waffle topped with eggs and cheese--I believe the menu called it "Waffle Breakfast". Needless to say after three nights of questionable Norwalk fare and three months of wedding, honeymoon and newlywed overindulgences, E and I are back to our pre-wedding regimen. All of the Egg Beaters and Boca Soy Sausage breakfasts that keep me from gaining back 160 pounds. Maybe I should've started before I went on national television again, but it's not like I ever let myself get monstrous or anything.
The filming looked like this...
The Balderdash board looked like this...
The Jeremy and the new Jeremy/Kelly cat looked like this...
The spider that welcomed us back to Florida and our apartment looked like this...
Wait, to explain...
This starts with the cat. Our cat Yoshi and her green body wrap that had shifted its way down her body, clumping into one rounded hump that made her much resemble a turtle. We came home to find that she was perfectly fine after the horrible, bleeding spay suture incident of the week before. Totally crazy kitten, so nothing to worry about. Until she starts scooting her butt around the apartment like a dog does. Just wiping her butt around and meowing and I'm thinking, "Here it is. Oh God, here it is. Her intestines are coming out of her butthole now."
E grabbed her by the neck and held her up as I surveyed whether I should pull this dark mass from the cat's butt or what. It was just poop and not intestines, I decided, and so I would grab a napkin and pull it out of the cat. None of this is pleasant for the cat, or for myself. But I tug. And tug. And it keeps coming, and coming and oh God it must be her intestines it's so long.
It's actually a foot of string. Damn cat ate her own stitches out! I'm freaking out about that for about a minute. This green wrap that had clumped down exposed enough of her sutures for her to pull at them and eat them. Now the wrap was the only thing holding her together!
Except it was only dental floss. She ate dental floss and I'm sure glad I figured it out. The contents of the bathroom garbage being strewn about the ground when we first arrived home and all.
Pulling dental floss from the cat's butthole was our first welcome back to Florida. This happened not ten minutes after walking in our front door.
The second was, again, this...
We'd stopped at Publix on our way home from the airport to buy subs for dinner. After the whole cat incident, we settled down with our sandwiches to watch American Idol.
Fifteen minutes later, Elise was screaming, throwing her sandwich across the apartment, jumping over me, kicking and bruising me in the side of the leg, screaming and running across the apartment.
My first thought was that maybe it wasn't dental floss I'd pulled out of the cat's butt, but actually her stitches and the cat had opened up like a fish at her feet.
Then E is barely able to say, "Spider! Spider! It's the biggest fucking spider I've ever seen." It was coming up on her foot, the cat chasing behind it, then it scurried under the couch.
YEAH RIGHT. A gigantic spider where we live? In the middle of tourist town, where the only trees are now a Carraba's Italian Grille? She's never lived in the woods of Loxahatchee, Florida, so she hasn't seen the big spiders that I've seen.
So I say, "Thin legs or thick legs?" She says, "Thin."
"Okay," I say, "I can deal with thin." Then I run and grab the broom.
"But not thin like a Daddy Long Legs." Oh shit.
She grabs a flashlight and I lay down on the carpet, totally unaware of what I am about to see. I flash the flashlight under the couch and I can only see half of this...
It's the biggest spider I've ever seen. It's bigger than anything I ever saw in the woods of Loxahatchee. It's got the leg radius of a motherfucking Burger King Whopper. It could grab a compact disc like a human grabs a compact disc, it's legs wrapped around the edges like our fingers. It's bigger than a hand! BIGGER THAN A HAND.
I jump up screaming, "I thought you said it had thin legs! Those aren't thin legs! The only spider with thicker legs than that is a damn tarantula!"
Everything in this, our first apartment, our newlywed home... everything here will forever be marked by this event. Everything is either pre-spider or post-spider because our lives here will never be the same. It's as if a pet died in a specific corner of this place and we'll always be sad every time we look there. Everytime we sit on our couch, we'll remember that spider and we'll think... there must be more. Spiders don't just get to that size without a hospitable spider environment in the walls or attic or somewhere.
How we killed this creature was like this...
1. I poked it with the broom. (This is when I discovered that it was FAST... too fast. Such big legs working with such perfect harmony, it was faster than a cockroach.) I am sure I hit it with the broom, but it just scurried into a box of books we keep under our end table.
2. I pulled the box of books out into the middle of our living room with a coat hook pole that I use to tease the cats. This was so we could keep an eye on the box from all sides.
3. We sprayed ant killer onto the spider's face and all over the books in the box without any care as to how important the books were to us (pretty important books). This is when it ran out of the box and under E's guitar, which was leaning against the wall.
4. We squished the guitar down on it's head. IT COMES RUNNING OUT. Some of it's legs are broken, for sure, but it is still fast. Not fast enough for...
5. Stephen King's Insomnia. Hardcover. 832 pages. The book that I had instantly decided would not bother me to be used in such a manner. It engulfed the spider and our feet smooshed it down harder just for safety. When we lifted the book up, the spider's legs were still twitching, so we gave it another 832 pages on it's head.
This whole process was around fifteen minutes long... us and the spider always feeling out each other's next move. There was more broom jabbing here and there and during all of it there were our neighbor's below us, banging on their ceiling because they're Grade-A Fuckheads. It was only nine at night and after Elise's blood curdling scream, I now know what our neighbors will do for us if we're ever being murdered. They'll bang on their ceiling and yell, "Stop being murdered so loudly up there."
I swept the spider into a dustpan and flushed it down the toilet. Then I flushed the toilet at least three safety flushes.
