Last night, I found a spider in our bed -- for the second night in a row. Not exactly an event to send you sweetly into the land of slumber.

I think we must have done something to rile them up - probably all of this talk about Marxism that goes on around here. The are uniting in fellow feeling with the other bloodsuckers (I'm looking at you, oil company executives) to take us down.

But Tris says it's just because Jonathan and I are now sleeping on a futon right on the floor, depriving the spiders of all the welcoming dusty places where they used to lurk so comfortably underneath the bed. The charm of sleeping together on the floor like we used to do in college has begun to wear thin.

The real estate agent was here last week to talk about "staging" our house.

"Don't move your furniture out," she said, standing in our living room.

"We already have," I said.

Apparently, we look like the sort of people who would have a decorating scheme that features cardboard boxes from the grocery store as a decorating focal point. Perhaps we specially hired The Grinch to come in and do up the place with his famous "nothing left on the walls but some hooks and old wire" aesthetic. The garbage bags marked "ARC" right inside the front door are an especially elegant touch, I think. Architectural Digest agrees -- they are bringing a photographer by later this afternoon.

I screamed when I found the spider last night and Jonathan came running with a shoe to vanquish it.

"You know," he said, "there will be a lot more spiders in Italy."

Yes. But there will also be -- famously -- a lot more shoes.