Capitalist that I am, I have advertisements at the very bottom of this blog. If about a million of you click them, I think I get a dollar. A web device reads my posts and then chooses ads based on words I write up here, on the premise that my readers will be interested in buying products related to what I write about. Thanks to last Monday's entry, I have two ads from outfits seeking to protect us from the dreaded brown recluse.

To make matters worse, this man's wife stayed with us last night and recounted the time he was almost done in by one of those creepy little beasts.

Nightmares. Sensation of things crawling under my clothes. Excessive jumpiness. You give me something to worry about, and I will jump on it like a hobo on a ham sandwich.

But for once the worry was a good down payment, because tonight I found a brown recluse in the kids' bathtub. I got the magnifying glass and checked. Freaky eye pattern, violin on the back -- a brown recluse is basically a dangerous little bohemian arachnid -- yep, an eight-legged assassin was waiting for my children.

So I crushed half his legs, made him swim in a cup of water for an hour, and then put him down the disposal. As a warning to the others. And before you PETA sociopaths start sending me hate mail, be assured that I would have done exactly the same thing had I caught a human being in their bathtub.

We are now on high alert. Defcon four. Glue strips all over the house. Tomorrow we teach the kids the shake-before-you-put-on-your-shoes technique. And goodbye bed skirts. This last mitigation is only a sacrifice for one member of the family who shall remain nameless, though I'll note that she's the one who can't pee on a fence.

Speaking of the wife, I told her we may need to just go without clothes and blankets completely, since the little beasts like to hide in those places.

No dice.

It's just as well. I've read that those little six-eyed freaky freaks can see in the dark.

So now it's spider hunting time. These night-crawlers have no idea who they're dealing with. I only need two hours of sleep a night, I'm a deadly aim with a newspaper, and I'm dangerously vindictive. No more Mister Ambivalent Regarding Arachnids. This time, it's personal.