Redneck Calendar

A good friend of ours, Danielle, gives my husband, Shawn, the “You Might Be a Redneck If…” calendar every year. It is something we enjoy, put up and out and go through at different times. I have no idea how many she has given us over the years, but it never gets old.

The saying for January 15, 2019 was “You might be a redneck if… your spatula doubles as a flyswatter.” This sparked an entire discussion in our house of all the strange things that have been used as a fly, bug, and spider swatter over the years, some with great success others not so much. Here are a few highlights.

There was the time I was sleeping, woke to see the blurry image of a ginormous spider on the wall and called for Shawn to bring the shotgun. Fortunately he was awake and used a shoe instead.

Years ago my mom and I discovered you can suck bugs up in the vacuum and spray RAID down the hose so they cannot crawl out. That saved us when my dad was out of town and we suffered a major invasions of the eight legged kind. My mom was a hero that time, but she often was and is. She can out think fear based thinking, even her own.

There was the coffee cup disaster. I bet I am not the only one who has made this discovery about coffee cups. The spider was racing across the table. I had a hot cup of joe in my hand. I tried to squash it with the bottom of the cup while splashing hot coffee all over. I cleaned up the spill, treated the minor burns before I discovered that the bottom of the cup was concave and only trapped the thing and had not killed it. Boy was that disappointing.

Books, paper pads, and magazines work well, but stay away from muddy shoes. They leave a stain on the wall. Dishcloths can be deceptive, sometimes the spider clings to the cloth and races to safety right up your arm toward your face. What happens after that is a lot of screaming and self harm. Thank goodness I was not slicing anything at the time.

Anyway, join the discussion, what was the strangest thing you have used to kill a bug, and did it work or make a mess?