The insects have begun to move indoors.

It actually started about a month ago, but the pace of the immigration has really picked up in the last few days. The little insect retirees are looking at the sky and saying, "Well, Maude, it looks like there's snow a-coming. Perhaps it's time to move into the villa." So Harold and Maude Ickybug pack up their stuff and move into my apartment with the other snowbirds.

The spiders are going to have a field day.

I have a love/hate relationship with spiders. I think they are really neat creatures. They hunt. They spin webs. They don't have any muscles. (A spider pumps blood into a leg to extend it and sucks the blood out to bend it. Remember that, it might win you a million dollars. To show your appreciation for my wealth of useless knowledge, please give me half.) But face it: they're creepy. They have too many eyes. They are hairy. (Even if you can't see the hair, it's there.) I can deal with spiders so long as I know where they are. Web weavers are best, since they generally stay put. If it's a spider that wanders around, forget it. It's toast.

I think my ick response to spiders is partially due to an event from my childhood. I was lying in my bed in the bedroom that I shared with Min. Moonlight was streaming in through our bedroom window, reflecting off the mirror and casting light upon the ceiling. I noticed the ceiling was moving.

So instead of staying in bed like a normal child and huddling under my blankets, I jumped up and flicked on the lights. I screamed. There were little baby spiders all over the ceiling. Everywhere. It was covered. The ceiling appeared to shimmer as the little baby spiders crawled all over. Then I noticed that some of them were spinning lines and coming down off the ceiling, onto the floor. Onto the dresser. Onto my sister's bed. Onto my sister. Onto my bed.

Far too much stimulation for a seven year old.

As I grew older my fear of spiders (very) slowly diminished. If a spider was in the room, I wouldn't scream and jump up on a chair. I would, however, get a wad of tissues and a heavy book and squish the little bugger. I discovered the spider-fighting properties of hairspray. I became a confident spider stalker.

Then I went to Girl Scout camp. We stayed in platform tents, and insects were always coming and going. I kept my sleeping bag zipped and my duffel bag closed, and always shook out my shoes before I put them on. It helped that one year I stayed with a girl had absolutely no fear of spiders. She took care of any eight-legged bandits that wandered into our tent.

One night the girls from the next tent started screaming, so I stuck my head out to see what the problem was. "A spider, a spider!" they screamed back, running to and fro in their pjs. My tent-mate sighed dramatically, grabbed a few tissues, and tromped over to the other tent.

This was no spider, however. It was a freakin' tarantula. I live in a temperate climate, but we have these creatures called wolf spiders. They are about half the size of your hand, and quite hairy. Our brave spider fighter looked at the two tissues she held, glanced back at the group of us huddled in the entrance to the tent and said, "I think I'm going to need something more than this." And then she raised her eyes. Her eyes got big. We looked up.

There was another wolf spider right above us.

We all slept in the van that night.

Fast forward to college. I move out on my own, into a basement apartment. (Word to the wise: never rent a place below ground level.) Things were going peachy until cold weather hit. And the spiders appeared.

I was used to little house spiders, those gray-yellow blobby things that spin webs. But these spiders were Not Normal. They were black. They had a light spot on their abdomens. They were hairy. Their bodies were about the size of a quarter and they had long legs. They were radioactive. They laughed at spider spray. Their eyes glowed in the dark. They got into everything: my dishes, my books, my bed, my clothes. They had eight legs and two little hands that ended in claws which looked like fists. They scurried around, waving their fists in the air. They were Teenage Mutant Ninja Spiders.

To this day I have no idea what kind of spiders there were. All I know is that they totally freaked me out. Eventually I got the idea to catch one and take it to the biology department so that they could tell me what sort of freakish things I had living in my apartment. But first I had to actually capture one, since they wouldn't be able to identify a black smear on the bottom on my sneaker.

I was sitting in my living room watching TV when one of the Mutant Spiders came scampering up onto my coffee table. Using my lighting-fast reflexes I plunked a glass down on top of it, trapping it. Then I tried to slide an index card under the glass.

It got out and started running around the table again, waving its fists at me and calling me dirty names. I dropped the glass down on it again.

While I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what to do, my eyes stumbled across a can of hairspray. "Ah hah!" I thought to myself. "I'll just lacquer the damn thing."

Grab can. Lift glass. Spray spider with hair spray.

If you've never sprayed a spider with hair spray I highly recommend doing it at least once in your life. Hair spray is essentially an aerosol plastic, which hardens to keep your hair in place. It suffocates the spider while freezing their limbs in a thin coat of plastic. Excellent if you want to preserve a spider.

I doused the spider fairly well. Its scurrying slowed to a halt as the plastic hardened. I gave it a few more squirts before putting the can back down and watching the Mutant Spider for a few moments.

Nothing happened.

Confident that the spider was defeated, I turned my attention back to the TV. After I was watching for a few minutes, though, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked at the spider.

It didn't move.

"You're just imagining things," I told myself. But I couldn't take my eyes off the ugly thing on my coffee table. And then I saw it do a pushup.

And another.

It was moving! It was still alive! I grabbed the hairspray and emptied the rest of the can on the thing. It paused for a moment before continuing the pushups.

The spider was pushing itself up from the table, trying to free itself from the hairspray that coated it. First the front legs, then the next set...

It was all too much for me. I beat it to death with a shoe.

A month later I moved to a new apartment.