Giant Vampire Death Spider attacks the Busted Nib.

Hello! I'm back at work now, and the post-COVID 19 work load has been horrendous. It's kept me from making time to update my blog; I apologize for that. I do actually have a genuine pen-related post coming up, where I'm going to show off my beautiful new Monteverde Innova (made of carbon fiber!) pen which came to me by way of New Zealand. I promise to get to that, along with my new Conklin "Mark Twain" Crescent Filler pen...as soon as it shows up from Yafa's warranty repair (or in this case, "replacement") services in California. Long story, which will wait until that post, hopefully in a week or two. Sheer pen loveliness! In the meantime, let me tell you about a ghastly encounter I had at home the other day.

So, I was about to step into my shower just the other day when the most awful thing ever happened. I noticed a spider the size of a Volkswagen Rabbit dangling in my shower! And, well, the strangest thing happened! At that same instant, I noticed a high-falsetto, girlish, notably un-masculine squealing noise coming from that same bathroom. It was the same sort of high pitched shriek that a school girl might make after some playground rival had just set her pigtails on fire. Can spiders do that? I didn't know they could do that! Is this some sort of defense mechanism they have?

Anyway, this ghastly horror is easily the size of a refrigerator, and it's squirming legs and gnashing fangs threatened my undoing. Be advised: this is a particularly awful thing to contemplate when one is in a certain state of undress as I was, seeing as how I had been planning on this shower, and all. Very little stood between my pale tender hide and this nightmare monster. Worrying about how I'd go about fork-lifting its monstrous carcass out of my apartment was going to be the Maintenance Man's problem. I suddenly found myself armed with a toilet plunger, and striking a manly dueling pose, I commenced battle!

It then occurred to me that the puzzling, high-pitched girl-shriek could actually have been coming from ME. I cannot confirm this. My foe lashed out at me with legs, fangs, tentacles, laser beams, and that disturbing, hypnotizing vampire glamour-stare super-villain-power they have, like in Dracula. Bah, no matter. The fight was on! I gave back both parry and thrust with my plunger-weapon! It was a near thing, given that it weighed more than I do (no mean feat, that), but at last, I defeated the giant Klingon alien death spider and hurled my enemy's corpse unto the mountainside. --Uh wait, I think that was Gandalf and the Balrog. --uh, and flushed this God-awful, gruesome, ghastly, grisly, hairy horror down the commode. Luckily I had the plunger, because I had to force his monstrous werewolf-death-spider-carcass down the ol' bog with it, with some effort. Victory was mine!

Then, right after that, I might have peed myself.

I. HATE. SPIDERS.

--Assistant Editor's note: If any of you try to practical-joke my pet human, and mail him like a dead spider or something, and he makes that appalling shrieking noise again, I will literally go to your house, bite you, chase off your cat, bite you AGAIN, and then totally poop in your yard like you absolutely cannot believe. Don't test me. Thanks --Maggie.

On a happier note, I *do* promise there is a pen-post in the works, but if you're not too bored with my "I really like playing chess" commentary then, here's another quick entry in that regard... I was at my friend Lenny's house in nearby Arkansas (not his real name; but it's funnier than calling him "Leonard"; also not his name) last weekend, and in the decades that my little (don't judge) Dungeons & Dragons gaming group has been meeting there, I'd never gotten around to asking him about the "Renaissance Chess Set" he's had perched at the very top of a book case this whole time. When I finally asked about it last weekend, he obligingly got it down for me and let me have a look at it.

Apparently, the previous owner had taken excellent care of it. Judging by the booklet that came with it, it was made in 1959. Lenny says it turned up in a garage sale where his mom had found it decades later and bought it for him. It then sat on his bookshelf for all these years since, and in all this time, I never before asked about it. How does that happen?!? Have I gone senile? Have a look at the rule book that it came with.

You can click these photos to see a larger, easier-to-read image, if you like.

Lenny isn't an avid chess player, but he's held onto this thing forever and has kept it in just as good a condition as it's previous owners had. I've "haunted" my share of local department stores and their toys & games section since I was a kid, and have never run across this before, anywhere. I wonder where it originally came from? Here's a look at the chess pieces.

Apologies for the poor lighting. Nifty, eh? Anyway, as soon as I can find myself that chess club or weekend chess game that doesn't conflict with my work schedule...or somehow maybe start a club of my own...I now have this super-nifty chess club kit for it that I recently ordered cheaply enough from The Chess Warehouse. (I tried to talk to our local library about a chess club the other day. They liked the idea, but are still banning gatherings right now thanks to the virus outbreak.) I love this thing:

There's room in it for chess books & score-books, chess magazines, and so on...

I've been going through books written by United States Chess Federation Grand Masters who teach you chess strategies and walk you through notable chess matches from the past, move-by-move, and I've been recreating those old games via that tournament style set (made of a roll-up-able vinyl board and big plastic pieces) you see on my kitchen table there. I enjoy studying how those past chess players set up "traps" for their opponents, constructed their defenses, and so on. But without a chess group, that's all the chess playing I do right now. I must be the world's loneliest chess player. :-)

Thank you for your time, and if you're looking for a pen pal reply from me, I've not forgotten you! I'm gradually working my way through a stack of pen pal letters, while coping with approximately 6,949,021,333,000,000,000,000000000000+ emails from customers at work whom we are struggling to respond to after the pandemic shutdown. It's left me a mental vegetable at times...but this too shall pass.

See you at the mailbox.