Just before I start I wanted to say a massive thank you again for the 50.000 comments and answers to my posts yesterday. A special thanks to everyone who posted answers to the “ single child “ conundrum I was facing. I read them all and so did Heidi and we both wanted to say thank you for your support and your opinions. Good Monday morning everyone and I hope today on Facebook I will take away just a portion of your Monday morning back to work blues as we talk about your cruises and the sunshine and spiders. Yep, spiders. My 2015 schedule is all about set now and while I am lucky, very lucky that Heidi and Kye will be joining me for my trip to New York this weekend they will not be joining me for my month long trip to Australia and the Carnival Spirit and Carnival Legend. There are 2 reasons for this. Most importantly Kye has school and while I can sneek her out for a 4 day Big Apple adventure a 4 week absence from school would mean I as her parent would be sent to the Tower of London where I would be forced to share a cell with Pine Bluff Storm Hess Keith Thomas who have been sentenced for a year for every screen name they have. The second reason Heidi will not be coming with me is spiders. Now I guess you have to be a true agrnophobic…….arsenopobic……angrypubic………a true hater of spiders to understand just how my wife feels about them . I have some sense of her terror because I am married to someone whose fear of spiders is extreme. Heidi can handle birth, waxing her thighs and pulling of Brazilian rain forests of hair and the stresses and strains of everyday life of raising one child ( yes just one child Jim Storm) with calm and assurance. Mention the word spider and she morphs into a straight to DVD b movie star who is being chased by someone in a hockey mask armed with a chainsaw. We live in the middle of what’s called Hockley Woods and year round these eight-legged bastards emerge from woods with the sole intention of tormenting my wife and me because I spend each and every day on spider hunt, patrolling the bedrooms and lounge and kitchen armed with one of my wife’s Birkenstock sandals. To Heidi, living here is a like a real life version of some video game. Our house is briefly transformed into a sort of zombie house of murder and gore in which dropping your guard, even for a moment, can have terrible consequences. We don’t have poisonous spiders in England but they do grow fairly large. But nothing compares to the ones I saw in Jamaica. Heidi and I spent our honeymoon in a villa in a place called Silent Waters in Montego Bay, Jamaica, it was beautiful and we had a epic time. However, it is memorable to me because I had one experience that for obvious reasons I never told Heidi about until we were safely on the plane heading back to the UK. It was around 2 am. Heidi was fast asleep and I awoke with the sudden call of nature. So I went into the bathroom and did my number two’s. As I sat there, still half asleep, a spider the size of a small dog unexpectedly crawled out from behind the toilet and scampered across my bare foot. I reacted like I’d had a red hot poker shoved up my arse. Blind panic took control of my body before the need to stop “going” had registered in my brain……..you can imagine the scene. I was half in and half out but I did not care because a mutant spider as big as my head was in the crapper with me. My scream had woken Heidi who was shouting “John are you OK, where are you?” I am shouting back “Yes, yes, just really constipated, really bad stomach cramps.” There is poo on the floor and somewhere in the darkness lay a huge sodding spider. Now if I had told Heidi that the truth we would have gone home that night. I am not kidding. Seriously, the honeymoon would have been over. The end. I watched as the spider sped out of the bathroom into the dressing room area obviously as horrified at the sight of my arse as I was of it. I went back to bed, telling Heidi I was feeling better but it was probably best she use the other bathroom for a bit. The next morning while Heidi was still asleep I went stealthily into the bathroom armed with a size 11 Nike Air Jordan……..but the spider had buggered off and we never saw it again. After cleaning up the evidence of the previous night’s horrors (that was not a pleasant experience) I returned to my wife who woke to say how sorry she was that I had stomach cramps. I felt bad not telling her the truth…..but I had paid loads of money for this vacation and no way was I going to let a bloody spider ruin it. Australia of course has some of the biggest spiders in the world and because of that………….and because of the programs we watched with the very much missed Crocodile Hunter the late great Steve Irwin, she just wouldn’t go with me. But I will be there, I will be going down under and will share all the stories on my blog and of course be here each day on Facebook. The Australians go to work in shorts and that’s a good enough reason to be jealous of them. Also, they have ovens in their kitchens but choose to cook their shrimps in the garden. The Australians have plenty for us to envy though, Australia represents a kind of alternative reality like the ones in Star Trek. It offers freedoms that most countries are truly jealous of. And oh boy, how Australians love to cruise. Anytime I have had Aussies on the ships with me they have been fun, outgoing and love to meet and mingle and meet as many new mates as they can. They are also extremely good for bar revenue. Anyway, more on that later but for now I just answered a question from Charles Smith and with apologies again to anyone who has to re-post and with huge thanks to those who helped me with this weekends requests I will spend the day answering your questions so let me know how I can help. Cheers John
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 10:53:22 +0000
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