The Battle of the Black Widow

This morning Westley opened the sliding door to let Snoopy out. Then he said, "oh look, a spider!" For the next 5-10 minutes, I was helping other kids get ready, and kept hearing him stomping by the door. I looked over from the other room and saw the door still open.

"What are you doing? Close the door!"

"But Mom, the spider won't die!"

So I went over to the door and saw, of all things, a huge black widow spider in the runner of the sliding glass door. It was struggling, but mostly seemed like it was trying to climb out of the door runner.

"That's a black widow spider, Westley!"

Westley instantly jumps about a mile from the door, and I start shaking. I'm terrified of spiders, more specifically, poisonous ones. Having experienced trying to crush a black widow with my shoe before and having no luck--those things just don't die!--I grabbed the hammer from the tool kit in the kitchen and started pounding away. The head of the hammer was just big enough to not fit into the narrow door runner, and therefore did little but scare the spider further into the door runner. So I went back to the tool kit and grabbed a Philip's head screwdriver and proceeded to jab the spider until it curled up and the guts started coming out.

"Was the spider outside when you first opened the door?"

Westley points to the door runner and shows me that she was already in the door runner, only a few centimeters from inside our house!

Time to get some pest control going on!!!

I now have a dead black widow spider in the corner of the door runner. And now I will be paranoid and unable to sleep at night with nightmares of black widow spiders coming in all the doors and windows.