So last night, I was watching Grey's Anatomy with the wife and we were just sitting on the couch. We leave the porch door open a lot so the cats can go in and out as they please, since they like to lounge out there so much. We always keep an ear out, since one of them thinks she can fly and has successful navigated her way across to the neighbors porch on more than one occasion. (*We are on the second floor and the neighbors porch is at least 7 feet away, so yeah.*)
So we're sitting there and we hear some sort of commotion from the porch. Then it stops. We call to them but no one comes in. So I get up and go out there and I see both Gia and Tootsley are tracking something. I go to shoo them back inside and they both actually run away from the door and towards the ledge of the porch, like they're going to jump up on it, which they are not allowed to do. So I lean down to prevent them from doing so, which puts my face about 8 inches from the ledge. And as this is happening, my brain registers that what they are looking at is a ginormous praying mantis that is sitting 8 inches from my horrified face. I proceed to run screaming like a lunatic all the way back through the house till I'm as far as I can possibly get from the porch, with my wife screaming "WHAT?? WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!?!!"
I manage to squeak out, "Praying mantis" with what must have been a mask of complete and utter lunacy on my face.
Now, as I've mentioned in a previous post, I have an ungodly fear of praying mantis', since having one land on my face while driving on the highway. I'd probably handle coming face to face with an axe murderer better than I do encounters with praying manti. But HH went out to the porch, corralled the cats back in and shooed the offending bug of horror off the porch. She comes back in and looks at me. I'm breathing as though I've just run a 10K, my heart is seriously racing and I'm pacing back and forth. She just stands there for a second before doubling over with laughter so hard that she snorts and has tears coming out of her eyes. I'm feeling a little offended by this and she tries to reassure me.
She tells me that she's not laughing at my for my fear, cause she's well aware what that's like. (*Spiders are her Achilles heel.*) But she's laughing at the manner in which I came running into the house. I say that I don't even know how the hell I came back in, just that it needed to happen as quickly as possible.
She tries to tell me, but gets lost to another laughing fit, through which she's finally able to say "You flew through here completely on your tippy toes, like you didn't even want to touch the floor at all." So now I understand and I can finally join her in laughing at the image of me doing ANYTHING on tippy-toes, let alone running a sprint.
But too bad. I really liked my porch. I'm dissapointed that I can never go out there again. I can't believe I almost kissed the damn thing.