Up All Night

We are not procrastinators.

Not really.

Not much.

Well, if I’m being honest…we are a bit.

 As our moving date approached we took the carrot and stick approach of “let’s pack one box and then watch an episode of Doctor Who on DVD.”

 

Yeah…we somehow ended up watching more Doctor Who than packing boxes.

To be fair, we did pack a whole lotta boxes. But any odd shaped or sized thing was relegated to the back room to be dealt with “later.”

 

Suddenly it was the night before the big day and what did we have? A room chock full of stuff and six spiders who needed to be put in their travel boxes. How much time did we have?

 

Until 7am.

 Oh dear.

 So we got cracking. We packed boxes and snacked on any last thing that couldn’t carried with us and worked out little booties off. Unfortunately, because everything left to pack was odd size or shape it was tricky to get it all in a box.

 Did I mention that we were rapidly running out of boxes?

 

At 5am everything but the spiders had been done. We were running on adrenaline and time pressure and love. It was amazing that we had not snapped at each other or murdered the other one.

 

Now, we normally don’t have to put the girls in their travel boxes all at the same time. When we have to clean out their tanks, we do one a day and let them leisurely make their way into the dreaded box with no time pressure.

 But now there was two hours to go and six little girls needed to be cooperative.

 They weren’t.

 Perhaps they could feel our time pressure and we were trying to be as quick and firm as we could, but they needed to get outta the tank and into the box.

 There was  quite a bit of “I don’t want to go in the box!” and “Don’t make me go in the box!”

 How do you know when a spider doesn’t want to do something?

 They tell you.

 Not with words, but with gestures.

 There was much hair flicking (a defence mechanism where a spider uses a leg to flick irritating hairs at the predator) and some defensive postures (see below) to make themselves look big and scary. This usually means “I don’t want to bite you, but I will if I have to. Hopefully if I scare you, you’ll piss off and leave me alone.”



from flickrhivemind.net

 There was one narrow escape attempt by Pippi, but by 6:30am, all were safely in their travel boxes. Poor girls. They were probably quite stressed and frightened and that is the last thing we would want. No wonder they were flicking and posturing. Poor spiders. But they survived and are thriving in their new home, never fear.

 

Did I mention that as soon as Spiderman got a girl into a travel box, I would dash outside as the sun rose in the sky with the tank, empty the substrate, dash back inside and wipe out the tank and wrap it in bubble wrap and place it inside the previous tank (Spiderman had the good sense to pack up the girls from biggest to smallest so the tanks would nest inside themselves).

 

It was done.

 Spiderman took the fastest bath known to man and was out the door with all the spiders safely tucked in his travel bag and headed for the train (what First Capital Connect Train Services doesn’t know won’t hurt them!) so he could get to Wales early and get the keys from the Estate Agent and I was left to collapse in a heap and wait for the removal van to arrive at 9am.

 

Stay tuned for the exciting saga of the Tetris removal van!