So why, more than a year after my last blog post (which was written more than a year after the post before that) am I suddenly resurrecting the MooseBlog?
Spiders.
One spider, really. Which might actually be dead. Maybe. I haven't had the balls to get close enough to check.
This is a significant moment for me. You see, I spent the better part of my afternoon talking my older sister's ear off about how I can't handle the toy industry's insistence on drowning little girls' ambitions with an endless parade of pink and purple princess tat. I hate the fact that it gives girls the message that they are somehow inferior when even the doctor's sets, the veterinarian's sets, or the special girly Legos that they find in the girls' toy aisles are colored an insipid pink or purple. It drives me insane to think that while back in the 80s I was playing with a fairly wide range of toys made just for kids and not girls OR boys (hey, Playskool really only used to come in bright primaries and murky creams), today's girls are being overwhelmed with the constant message that even though the world is at their fingertips their real goal in life should be to become a pretty (perhaps even sexy) princess.
Princesses, as we all know, are traditionally around mostly to pine over princes and wait to get rescued.
And yet here I am, ladies and gentlemen. Barricaded in my bedroom. Looking out of the window and absolutely willing my husband to return from the other side of the world (he's in Singapore until Friday and it's just Wednesday night right now) to rescue me from the (ooooh, I don't even want to say the word) spider that is lurking, dragon-like, on the stairs.
You get the irony, right? I would actually let down my long, long hair and use it to climb out of my window were it not for the fact that another spider has set up camp on the window frame outside.
I posted about my dilemma on Facebook a few minutes ago and have been offered plenty of lovely and useful advice about how to dispatch the diminutive beast, but in reality I have an obsession with not killing spiders, even though they scare the hell out of me. It's some kind of sentimental hippie thing that I have about the spider's right to be alive even though I don't really want it in my house.
Aaaaaagh, which is why I need my husband to scoop it up in his hand (it's a superhuman feat, I tell you) and escort it outside, preferably somewhere further than just a few feet away from the front door.
Not for the first time in my life, spiders have left me feeling a bit useless (if you want to know about the other time, ask my older sister, who basically de-spidered my house in Oxford while I lay curled up and crying in the middle of my bed), but at least I have a blog and my trusty ol' sarcasm to get me through it.
And these two, who I think you will agree are not giving this dire situation the attention it deserves:
