Spiders and Bunnies and Mice! Oh, My!

Tonight's episode brought to you by...Ajax Dish Soap. Gentle On Hands, Tough On Spiders.


Thank you. Thank you. We're excited to be back on the air. Thanks to Blake and his Black Friday shopping skills, we picked up a card reader so we can download pictures for our episodes with ease. So now we have a million things to update you on. (So much time, and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.) Anyway, we have a great show for you tonight. We are going to introduce you to the little zoo we have in the making.


First is our very well known guest, Mr. B.R. He and his family members have been found in toilet paper rolls, under newspaper, behind pillows, under beds, on ceilings, behind furniture, in cabinets, falling from the ceilings, on walls, in clothes, in windows, in the shower curtain, pretty much everywhere. The first picture is B.R. alive in a dish detergent bucket. I was the lucky one to find him when I went to get a sponge from it. After watching him climb up the bucket a few times, Blake finally killed him by dropping him in Ajax dish soap. (This was about our ninth one down, and according to our B.R. expert, a.k.a. "Spider Man", about 291 more to go.) After killing him, Blake realized that the spider lost his original television-quality stature. So with some time in the hair and makeup room, he was posed on a piece of paper using toothpicks to stand his legs up and was sprayed with starch to make his fiddle look extra shiny and his leg hairs extra stiff. (The things we do to please our audience.) This is shown in the second picture. If you look closely you can see an upside down fiddle on his back. The neck of the fiddle points down to his bum. Yes, spiders have bums too. And if you really zoom in, you can see his hairy legs. He must take after Blake...okay okay, and sometimes Jenny too.

Our next guest is Gus Gus. Now Gus Gus has many friends. Two of his friends were killed in our kitchen, three in the garage. But Gus Gus himself has yet to be caught. Oh yes. It's true. Blake doesn't believe me, but who said we had them at our old duplex? Me. And who caught a mouse at our old duplex? Pugsley. Blake said last night the scampering above the ceiling was just rain. It wasn't raining. Then he said it was the heater. The heater was not on. Then he said it was blowing ice. I didn't hear any wind! Oh, Pugsley! Where are you when I need you?

As noted in previous posts, at his request, Gus Gus's picture was edited in order to protect his identity. As you can see, he will not go down without a fight.
Here is my favorite guest, Peter. Peter Rabbit spends his nights in our front and back yard. We often see him when we drive in our driveway at night. He is the cutest from behind when you can see his little white tail (what Scamp once spotted when he almost caught him in the backyard). Lucky for Peter (and Scamp because he would have been in record-long time out), he escaped under the fence.

Here is Kermit. He introduced himself while Blake was on the computer one night by hopping into the glass of our sliding door. The picture isn't super clear, but if you look closely you can see his two black eyes next to a big brown leaf.

Rocky is Scamp's arch enemy, but he is another one of my favorites to have a stay here. He has been very busy lately collecting stuff from one of the trees by our house. We always see him running across the top of the fence. I think sometimes he does it just to tease Scamp. Meet Charlotte, an orb-weaving spider. For any of you who don't know, orb-weaving spiders make "wagon wheel" webs. Spider Man said that they can't hurt humans, which was a HUGE relief after we saw our first one hanging right outside of Abby's window. They look scary, but once we saw one eating a dead B.R., so they are up there with cookie dough ice cream and Sour Patch Kids in my book.





Next we have the cicadas and chiggers. The cicadas introduced themselves to Pat and me like this: "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" No, no. That just doesn't do them justice. Here is a video clip of some authentic Kansas cicadas. To get the full effect, turn your speakers up full blast:

Only it didn't stop there. OH no. It went on...and on...and on. Pat and I literally had to yell in order to hear each other over the cicadas. According to the local newspaper, they are the loudest insect on earth and their sounds can reach the limit a human ear can tolerate.

Chiggers are little teeny bugs that live in the grass and crawl onto your skin and eat it (your skin). When someone in the ward told me about them, I thought they were kidding. "Chiggers", huh? Yeah...okay...sssurrre. Then I asked someone else about them and I think I called them "choggers". They must have gotten a good laugh out of that one, but they confirmed these so-called chiggers. We soon found out that they itch like crazy--just ask Scamp. (Poor Scamp had chigger bites covering his whole belly.) They like to bite you where they meet a roadblock like your waistline. Since Scamp doesn't usually wear pants, they went crazy on him. Luckily, they only live like one day. Both cicadas and chiggers die off by the end of summer. Hence, I've never loved the coming of winter like I do here! The first picture is of a dead cicada, the second is of a chigger on a dime. No, we did not take the second awesome picture. (Yeah, we're pretty great, but NOBODY can be great at EVERYTHING.)

Let's see...how many more guests do we have to go? And you thought I was almost done, didn't you? Ah, yes, we have a newcomer: the mole. We first discovered Moley when we'd walk across our lawn to get the newspaper and we'd sink into one of his mole trails. Luckily, Spider Man also treats moles at no extra cost. I'm going to miss little ol' Moley. He's going to be gone before we really grew to hate him. So sad. The nice folks at Google Image provided this rather flattering picture. Here he is at his Moley best.

And last but not least we have Stinky, the adorable lab rat. Stinky was the only guest that was actually invited. That makes him another of my favorites--because he was invited, his stay was up, and he's gone! Too bad Blake didn't train him in teaching manners to his fellow guests. Instead, Blake trained him to drop marbles into a can. Useful? No, but it did get Blake an "A" on his project, which is one step closer to Salt Lake, so I say, "Yay for Stinky!" Also starring in this video is Blake, the adorable trainer. Without further ado, here is Blake and his pal Stinky...

Well, we're out of time for tonight, but thanks for watching. Tune in next time for more exciting episodes from the...Blaaaake and Jennnny Hansen Show!