You know how when you come home after long and brutal 20 hour travel day and you just collapse into bed and sink into a deep, deep, richly satisfying sleep and then at 2 am the battery in the fire alarm in your bedroom runs out and starts to beep? No? Well I do.
And then after you get your ladder, because my ceilings are 75 feet high, and take the battery out you discover it’s one of those wacko rectangular batteries with “snaps” on it and it’s 2 in the morning and there is nothing open anywhere near here. Without a great deal of hope I went downstairs to the drawer above my tool drawer which is what my niece would call a “monkey drawer” but in my case is more like a “monkey island drawer” in which you can find everything from blue metallic thread to super glue to some little wooden things whose purpose is long lost to me. But there, miraculously, was one of those square snap batteries. Thank god I lit all of those candles I’m sure that did the trick.
So I got that all straightened away, still tired enough to be able to get back to sleep, I turned off the light and noticed a large black thing moving across the wall up at the ceiling near my bed. I mean, seriously????!!!?! Because I am basically blind I could not tell what it was. Too small for a bat, I hoped, too big for a spider, I hoped as well. I put my glasses on, turned on the light and discovered the largest centipede I’d ever seen in my life.
I got a fly swatter and took a whack at it only to have it fall onto me. Well. I am proud to say that my response was not as desperately fruitsational as one might expect under those circumstances, still, I noticed that lights in neighboring houses went on. But I freaking lost the thing . . . IN MY BED!!!
You know, just what you want to be doing at (now) 2:45 in the morning even on a good day. I took the bed apart, removed everything from and moved the night stand. It streaked across the floor and under the dresser with such speed I didn’t even have a chance to comprehend what was happening. I mean, the freaking thing has a million legs. The dresser is an inch off the floor and immovable. Fine. There’s a centipede living under my dresser. I am at one with nature. I went back to bed and slept until 5:45.
Nightmare!!