Dwight and Arachnids

For FHE last week, we played a fantastic game called Bigger and Better. I don't know who all has participated in this epic activity, but for those of you who don't know what this is, get ready for some awesomeness.

You get in groups and start out with something small and relatively worthless and cheap, such as paper clips or pennies. You go to random people's houses, knock on the door, and ask if they have anything bigger or better that they want to trade for said small item. (This seems wierd, but it's Utah, so you are generally safe because people know about wierd games like that here. ) You will be surprised at the insane things people will give you. You'll get such great loot that it is usually wise to bring along a pickup truck, and even the smaller items can be surprisingly valuable. We played this in mutual when I was in High School and ended up with an end table from the 1800's that someone's grandmother brought from England on a boat. The other group got a trampoline. Seriously.

When we played this, we started with dish sponges. From a dish sponge, my group got, in order, a bottle of contact solution, a fake flower arrangement,  a TV, and last, a purple armchair. (We also got scolded pretty hard by an old man who was quite offended that we weren't watching the President. Nobody remembered the State of the Union Address was on before we left.)  Jeff, who had been carrying the TV for a while, carried the chair a few blocks back to our building. (there was a lot of stuff stuck in the cushions. he was shaking out the crayon fragments from his hair/clothes for a while afterward.)  So we sat it in the hallway for a while admiring our work, and then, because we are wierdos, we named the chair Dwight.

We moved Dwight into our living room. The really amusing part comes next. The day after that, I was in my room with a movie playing while I slugged through some math homework and Katie was doing homework with her headphones in and the door was closed. I hear a wierd noise and go out in the hall to investigate, right? Sarah, standing in the kitchen, sees me and yells, "You are a horrible roommate! I screamed and you didn't come!" umm.. okay? I didn't hear anything. As it turns out, Sarah found a spider. (Which she claims was a foot long. Right.) Now, most of you probably don't know this, but Sarah, our very own ninja, who strikes fear into the hearts of large men named Tyrel with her ninjaness, is terrified of arachnids. She'll stab Shane with a fork when he annoys her or head butt Nate between the eyes without blinking and without remorse when he invades her bubble, but put this woman face to face with a spider and she dissolves into a shrieking mess. When she screamed and nobody came, she actually went next door and got Mike to come kill the thing. Apparently, "killing spiders is a man's job."

Why are these two incidents related, you ask? Sarah, having never ever seen a spider in our fair freezing city of Logan prior to that day, is convinced that the thing came from Dwight. She wouldn't sit in him for two days because I hadn't vacuumed him yet. So on Friday I came home from class and vacuumed, and cleaned out Dwight cause he was pretty dirty, even though Jeff found most of the Crayon fragments. I didn't find any spider remains, webs, or babies. So I think it's pretty safe to say the chair had nothing to do with it. A more convincing argument would probably be that I have killed spiders before, right here in our kitchen. But then, I'd have to be crazy to tell Sarah that. I like her better as a ninja than a squeamish little girl.