Spiders

I make no bones about it - I hate spiders, always have, always will. But lately, my spider-phobia has been getting better, even to the point where when I pick my wife up from work, I talk to them (there are some really big ones where she works...)

Anyhow, Sunday night, we were having a family discussion. We often have these, where we all sit down (if somewhat forced) and talk about what's bothering us. They usually start out a bit heated, and then die down into a useful, and sometimes funny conversation. Sunday night was really hot (as a family, we don't deal well with heat, and one of the points made was that the heat had made us all extra argumentative), so my youngest son when to make a cuppa.

"MUUUMM! DAAAAAD!"

We rushed into the kitchen, thinking he'd burned himself.

"There's a spider in the kettle!"

Sure enough, inside the kettle, lay one of the biggest domestic spiders I had ever seen - legs and all. It took several attempts to remove it, after flushing didn't work (it was stuck to the side), extraction with a knife (still stuck) and shaking, it was removed with a wooden spoon.

"That was really stuck in there, wasn't it?" said my lovely wife.

That's when it hit us. We'd been drinking tea/coffee all day - how long had that spider been in there? How long had we'd been drinking boiled spider?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHH!

Needless to say, we check every time we boil the kettle now... :)