Monday, September 1, 2025 – Day 384

Monday, September 1, 2025

Good morning, Happy Labor Day!

Spiders and snakes. Those are two things that give me the creeps. Which still surprises me, because as a kid I wasn’t fazed by either. We used to collect garter snakes by the dozens and keep them in a Styrofoam cooler in the basement. I don’t think we ever had a plan for them—they were just our “pets,” hidden from everyone else in the house.

One morning, following a full day of collecting snakes, I went down to check and discovered the snakes had all escaped. Oh-oh. The old refrigerator must have lured them out of their secure temporary home, because the snakes gathered around the warm coils underneath the fridge. Not having time to collect them, we’d head off to school and, by the time we got home, Mom had found them and tossed them outside.

Why she wasn’t scared, I’ll never know. But my sister Lis? She was terrified. From that day forward, she refused to set foot in the basement. As it turned out, that worked in our favor—when we were teenagers, the basement became our hangout, and Lis’s fear was our freedom. Thank you, snakes.

Fast forward to this morning. I’m in my comfy chair, enjoying the quiet, when something moves in my peripheral vision. I look closer—yep, a brown spider the size of a quarter crawling up the fireplace. Can’t ignore it. I grab some Kleenex and lean in, but the spider must’ve had a sixth sense about its fate. It dropped to the floor and darted under my chair. I tried to stomp it—protected only by socks—but missed. In my mind, it instantly grew to half-dollar size.

So I quickly moved to the next closest chair and kept spinning the chair I had just vacated, swiveling it back and forth, trying to flush it out. Ten minutes go by. Nothing. I’m not about to get on my knees (not unless someone’s ready to hoist me back up), so eventually I retreated to the couch. That’s where I sit now, wondering how Cindy will react when she reads this. I’ll let you know tomorrow.

Yesterday was a beauty, and we made the most of it. We wandered through the Crystal Lake car show, admiring all the classics. Our friend Mike was there with his 1968 candy-apple red convertible (not a ’67 fire-engine red, as I mistakenly wrote earlier). We chatted with him and met some of his family, then carried on downtown. Looking at those cars is fun, imagining owning one—but eventually reality taps you on the shoulder and you think…where would I store it?

In the afternoon we met Joe and Donna at Cooper’s Hawk to officially close out Joe’s birthday month. Mark and Barb joined too. The place was packed and loud, which made conversation hard for me, but it also reminded me that Peggy from ALS United offered me a voice amplifier. Maybe it’s time to take her up on that.

Joe scored one last birthday dessert and a full-throated “Happy Birthday” chorus—even though his actual birthday was three weeks ago. Not a bad strategy: stretch the party for a whole month, then finish with free dessert.

I was a little bummed we didn’t get to the pool. I wanted to try the corkscrew slide one last time. It would’ve made for a funny short video—but then again, a repeat dunking probably wouldn’t have ended so well. Best to leave that in the realm of “what if.”

Everybody have a great Labor Day. Love you guys! ❤️

P.S. Anyone want to kill a spider? He’s now the size of a silver dollar.