my hero

This morning started off with the noise of one of our neighbours trying to repair his gas lawnmower in the alley behind our apartment. For those of you lucky enough not to be able to imagine that sound, it's a little like a Harley Davidson with whooping cough. The very fact that anyone on our side of the street even owns a gas mower makes me want to kill and kill again, since the lawns on our side of the street are about eight by twenty four in front of the two apartment buildings, and nonexistent everywhere else. If eight by twenty four sounds like a lot of lawn, allow me to reassure you that it's not. But I digress.
We eventually staggered into the living room, sleep abandoned as a hopeless cause. I put the kettle on for coffee, sat down in front of the computer, and immediately freaked out. I guess it was the breathless fear noises that brought spook over to where I was frozen in my seat.
"It'sabugthere'sabugthere'sabugonthedesk!"
"Okay," he said, sounding reasonable, "why don't you--oh. It's an icky bug."

You know, I'm not an enormous fan of bugs in general, but I'm much more likely to rescue them than kill them--most of them don't want to be in my habitat any more than I want them there. Last week I dragged my hunting cat off to the bathroom so that a trapped bumblebee could very obligingly stroll into the tupperware container I offered it. When I was a nanny, I made a point of spending time with the kids looking at the ants and the worms and talking about why they were cool. Spiders were given a similar treatment. Cockroaches earned my ire in an early-life fumigation episode that left them falling from my little brother's ceiling in a yucky rain, but I'm matter-of-fact about killing them. House centipedes are another matter. They combine all the things that make the back of my brain weird--large, fast, many-legged. ("What do they need all those legs for? For crawling across your face in the middle of the night, that's what!") I appreciate their eating of the other bugs, but I don't want to see them. Especially on my desk.

Valiant spook (who is also terrified of them, for the record,) grabbed a sour cream container and swiftly trapped it where it sat, on top of our case of blank cds. "Do you think it's already dead?" I asked. It hadn't made a threatening rush of any kind, which is out of character. "It's kind of acting dead. I'm all for throwing it out the window to make sure." I was still talking way too fast, and spook was grimly executing his duty as fast as possible, and it may have been this atmosphere of speediness that explains why he opened the window and sent eight or nine cds sailing through the air, followed by their plastic case. "I think it was already dead." he said, sounding only a bit stunned.

Our superintendant and his boyfriend were very understanding about nearly being hit by high-velocity information storage, and they only laughed at me a little bit when I explained that he was saving me. Coolness under fire, that's us.