Another quote.

I need to set up a standard format to share some of these excellent quotes picked by Anu Garg over at Wordsmith.org.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. -Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (9 Nov 1934-1996)

I would say that current evidence lends a lot of support to that theory.

A baby tarantula!

Linnea is scared of spiders. I've never heard her throw a fit while we were hiking or camping, but a spider on the wall or in the shower will cause a SCREEEEEEEEEEEAM to wake the dead.

She's gotten better. A few years back, the screaming was so loud, we would all stop dead in our tracks, persuaded that someone was about to cut her jugular or something like that.

Now she just screams.

Which means fall, when the European house spiders visibly occupy houses in the Pacific Northwest, can be a rather screamy time of year.

And so it was tonight. She screamed. And begged us to come down to to kill the spider, even though she knows that we don't kill spiders.

Dh has to go take out the trash, and while she was waiting for him to come back -I still hurt enough that I'm not making un-needed trips up and down stairs- she tried to persuade the cats to eat it, complaining loudly from downstairs that BamBam was too dumb to do what she was asking and Twisp too lazy. Auri didn't bother going to investigate the wailing, so wasn't slagged upon.

I told her it was ok, just to ignore it and she wailed, and this cracked me up, that she couldn't it was a Big! spider! A baby tarantula at least! And it was going to eat her! (In one bite no doubt).

What I love about Linnea is that while she is genuinely scared, she has enough of a sense of humour about it to know that she's being over the top.

Anyhow. The baby tarantula (or, you know, a boring house spider) is now living in my bathroom.