Blessed by the Potato

After last night’s crazy heavy rain in Toronto, we found a fair bit of water in our basement. Muddy water (pics to come?).

It was a very disheartening discovery, since it was very late when we found it, and since we were basically driven out of our last house due to water issues in the basement and mould. One of our only major criteria for our new place was that the basement should stay dry. Both Wayfare and I had basically lived in the basements of our parents houses, and we fully intended on making the below-grade rooms part of our usable living space — workout room, office, play room for future kids, we hadn’t quite decided exactly what form that would take, but the basement had to stay dry, damnit. We even came to visit the place on a rainy day in December while what snow we had was melting, and it was fine.

Perhaps the recent earthquake opened up a crack, or maybe the rain was just heavy enough to overwhelm the gutters and weeping tile. Either way, we had to clean it up in the wee hours of the morning. We didn’t even have a mop on hand, so I had to run out to the 24-hour Metro and pick up a mop before we could commence cleanup operations.

The ordeal was made all the worse by the giant bugs that have invaded the basement. Being the brave warrior that I am, I smooshed the hell out of a giant centipede that was trying to blend in with the furnace. I then turned around to see two large, black legs poking out of the grate to the drain in the floor. The slender black legs were comically long — they don’t really make spiders that big, do they? — I figured it had to have been one of our prop plastic spiders from the Halloween box lodged in the drain.

Then it turned, and looked at me. It followed my movement across the room. This werewolf spider had my scent, and all eight eyes were locked on target.

I knew then that I was going to die.

The centipede was but a pawn in this war, trapping me on the wrong side of the drain from the stairs and freedom. Wayfare then bravely rushed to my defense, using her shoe to shear off the creepy legs with a mighty battle cry of “Bwaaaaaahhhhhhh!”. Outmatched, the spider retreated back down the drain. I quake in fear though at the idea that her mighty blow did not finish it off, and that down there in the darkness lies a 6-legged horror plotting revenge.

And I have to wonder: what the fuck is up with these giant, terrifying spiders? I thought they were a London thing, since I’d never seen them before in Toronto, but they seemed to follow me back up the 401, plotting my ruin the whole way. Centipedes and the tiny little transluscent house spiders I’m used to dealing with, since they were endemic at my parents’, but these monstrous, dark spiders terrify me beyond all reason. Where did they come from? Why are they in our basement? Both the spiders and the centipedes are top-of-the-food-chain predators in the bug world, but aside from the odd potato bug, there are no other bugs for them to eat down there.

Are they eating my fear?