Camping, Bruno, and other tales of woe

So here is the saga that is Bruno...

A few weekends ago Carrie pursuaded me and Nicole D to go camping. ONE night. One measely night. Well Miss Thang here doesn't "do" nature. I can't stand nature. I dig rocks and stuff like that (like in Arizona), but trees...clean air...bugs...not my thing.

I figure, I have a job so that i can NOT sleep outdoors on the ground.

Well anyway, we managed to get the tent up and the 3 of us are sitting around in some chairs talking and Carrie hears this noise that sounds like squirrel...suddenly she JUMPS up and starts squealing "What is that?!!"...

From a distance, it looked like a tarantula. So i start freaking out, because i'm deathly arachnophobic. But then I got close and saw what it was:


This thing was HUGE. HUGE. And it's arms were different colors from the rest of it's body. It was the size of a small dog. It rustled the frickin' leaves when it walked on it! LOOK AT THIS THING!


So i'm seriously freaking out because it's looking like it's heading to our tent, and infiltration in our tent was unacceptable. Nicole, bless her soul, took a paper plate and tried to fling it super far. Unfortunately, she managed to only chuck it a few feet ahead of us.


So they're all calm and cool but knowing that it didn't go very far didn't rest easy with me.


I couldn't calm down knowing that IT was out there. And what was IT called? We named him Bruno. The memory of it's massively huge disgusting body was giving me an ulcer.


Seriously, SERIOUSLY, this thing was effing nasty. And it had HUGE eyes. This thing could easily consume us in the middle of the night. What if it had babies? And friends? I could feel the chunks risingi n my throat as I panicked.


For me, the unknown is much scarier than the known, and if I had to find that effing Bruno well...dammit...i would. Which wasn't too hard...I stood silent and heard more CRUNCHING noises and easily spotted him hanging around the base of our nearby tree. I had to investigate the enemy.


I give Nicole serious props for having my back..or maybe she figured that if she stood behind me, Bruno would eat me first and that would give her time to run. Bitch!. Why didn't I think of that...

So she handed me her cell phone and told me to photograph it so we could identify it through her bug-expert coworkers (Nicole deals with nature and crap for a living. It's actually pretty interesting, but since I don't like nature I would probably stab myself with a fork if I had to deal with nature on a daily basis).

Since cell phone cameras have no zoom and really cruddy focus, i had to get within a centimeter of Bruno to take the picture:


After the cell phone plan failed, I took Carrie's camera and took a bunch more pictures of Bruno. I couldn't STEP on him becuase he was so big, it would be like stepping on a dog...in fact, his strength would probably push my foot in the air, i'd fall backwards, and then he'd chew me to a bloody pulp. He was an evil, evil thing...this Bruno.

Laying on his back:


Back to crawling and ready to kill the enemy....meaning...us humans...(insert Bruno's evil laugh MOO HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAA):


By now Carrie and Nicole were pretty fed up of my loud screaming, yelling, and general shrieks of terror, so I came up with a plan...I drew a line onthe ground and decided it was Our side vs. Their Side...(much like The Others on LOST)...I wouldn't fight Bruno as long as he stayed on his side of nature, and I vowed to stay on mine.


In case anyone cares, we later discovered it's a Jerusalem Cricket

So, the moral of the story is...i still don't "do" nature.