3 grandkids sleeping in my bed, 2:00 am for @aggro's crypto show and 1 huge Queensland huntsman spider... (Please sing the title to the tune of the Christmas carol 'A Partridge in a Pear Tree')!

So I saw on my feed a few days ago that @aggroed was going to be hosting a panel on crypto currencies, trading etc and very excited I was (ohoh I'm channeling Yoda!) Then I saw the time, 2:00 am my time in Queensland, Australia, to say my enthusiasm waned ever so slightly, may be slightly understating the situation...

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I double checked the world clock... Yes it really was 2:00 am so I put it in my calendar and thought, well that's probably not going to happen it's just too damn early, or too dman late depending on your point of view. Or so I thought... But never, ever under estimate the power of fate when it decides to intervene!

About 10 hours before @aggroed's appointed kick off time @mumofmany called and asked if I could have one of my grandson's Master 5, sleep over for the night. Master 5 has Autism (like many of my Grandbabies) and was having some behavioural issues and @mumofmany hoped a change of environment might resolve or at least reduce some of those issues to a more manageable level.

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No probelm, but of course Master 5 has 5 sibblings, and once the word was out that there was a sleep over on at Nana's house, there was a slight increase in numbers. So on arrival it was not just Master 5, it was also Master 7 and Miss 12. Now there were 3!

Actually 3 is fine, they do better as a group, they are all so used to being around at least 5 of their sibblings, that they can sometimes get a bit bored and lonely if seperated from the hoarde, and then I have to work extra hard to keep them entertained. Not good for Nana!

As usually happens Master 5 and Master 7 want dinner quite early around 5:00 pm because they are both quite early risers getting up between 4:00 am and 5:00 am so their days start very early. They wake up, they're hungry, they eat. So the day's meals get started somewhat early and the pattern is then set for the rest of the day and this routine tends to carry on into the weekends as well.

Having been called by @mumofmany at about 4:00 pm I had dinner planned in anticipation when they arrived (they only live about 10 minutes away). So when they walked through the door waling for food it was already in the pipeline and they could help with the preparation which always provides some distraction from non ideal behaviour too.

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So both Master 5 and Master 7 helped prepare their respective dinners and that kept them destracted for quite a while and then they had to spend time eating, so they were busy for a while longer. However, I was not ready for Miss 12 who decided she couldn't wait to have dinner with Great Grandpa and Nana and cooked up her own little vegitarian dinner speciality (mashed spuds), showing no interest in waiting to join us at a more civilised hour for Bangers and Mash.

While they were all eating and Miss 12 could supervise them at the dinner table, some making quite a bit more mess than others while watching some TV, I got showers organsed for the boys, lined up towels, soaps, PJs etc and made sure we had everything we would need so Miss 12 could have a break will I scrubbed!

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After spreading an alarming amount of water around Great Grandpa's ensuite (the master bathroom is being renovated), and getting Master's 5 and 7 dry and dressed round 2 of the food requests began. So we settled into dessert, with lots of help from Miss 12 who was doing a fantastic job of helping out with her little brothers.

No sooner had the last mouthful of food been chewed than Master 5 landed on my lap and wanted me to come and lie down in bed with him so he could go to sleep. No way was he going unless I went with him. Even though I had to wait for Great Grandpa to have dinner he wasn't giving up!

I did manage to persuade him to lay with his head on my lap on the sofa until I had dinner with Great Grandpa and in the meantime Master 7 went ahead into my bed with his iPad and got settled in to wait for me as well. During this time Miss 12 was in my office doing homework and texting with friends.

Master 5 was very patient, (actually he was a bit whingy), but he waited for me to eat my Bangers and Mash in record time and bolt to the bedroom and climb in bed with him and Master 7, albeit fully clothed so he could go to sleep. There was a lot of wriggling and jockeying for the best position next to Nana and the best position to view the iPad but unltimately... at least I fell asleep!

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Apparently, so did the boys and apparently Miss 12! Because around midnight I woke up to find Master 5 alseep in my arms, Master 7 had abandoned the bed, taken the extra blanket I bought in for myself (because they boys usually steal the doona) so I don't freeze in the current cold snap, and Miss 12 was asleep across the foot of the bed. Oh yeah, Master 7 took the iPad too!

It was at this point that I managed to climb out from under 2 of the 3 grandchildren and check on Great Grandpa only to find he was MIA! Bloody typical... It was pouring down rain, freezing cold and he was nowhere to be found in the 6 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms . OMG! Really! It's midnight....

Then I stood very quietly and listened and I could hear him sneezing downstairs in the garage. Relieved he hadn't fallen over and knocked himself out somewhere, he is 87. I set about doing all the dishes that were now piled up all over the lounge room, dining room, office and kitchen.

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Having completed my cleaning duties I sat down to have a well deserved coffee and thought I would just quickly check Steemit on my phone, which was when I saw the reminder for @aggroed's crypto currency panel. I looked at my watch it was almost 1:00 am... Wow, it's almost time I'm up I can do this thing. Fantastic!

So I set about making sure I could run it on my iPhone, but I couldn't get it to work (probably operator error!)... It was then that I felt I was being watched... All the hair on the back of my neck stood up, but apart from the rain on the tin roof of the Old Queenslander and Great Grandpa's occassional sneezes downstairs in the garage there wasn't a sound.

Just as I was about to go and check on my grandchildren, I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and I froze! Miss 12 had been wearing knee high Ugg boots, which she abandoned in the middle of the lounge room floor. Because they are brown, and the carpet is brown, and Great Grandpa is 87, and prone to falling bum over head on a semi regular basis, when I noticed this, I kicked the Uggies under a chair.

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But now there was something climbing over the top of the Ugg boots and it was quite substantial... It was a good sized Queensland Huntsman Spider! Bigger than a bread and butter plate but not quite as big as a dinner plate, more your entree plate size really...

He (or she) very casually climbed over the Ugg boots and started to stroll towards the coffee table, 1 of its 8 legs after the other. Now I try not to kill anything but I'm sorry spiders are my archilies heel, and it is definitely the legs they freak me out.

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I can't scream for assistance without waking the grandchildren so I'm on my own, which is not unsual for the average woman in Queensland, we are accustomed to dealing with these big buggers, but sorry Karma or no Karma, there is no way I can pick this thing up and put it outside, or I will die of fright!

Unfortunately, when it strayed into this 40 square metres of my 6000 square metres of Queensland, it was doomed. Sorry spidey... The thing is these suckers can jump, and they can run and they can do both surprisingly quickly, so there is no approaching them with a broom or anything with a long handle or getting too close to them or they will be on you like white on rice.

And while the bite of a huge Queensland Huntsman will not do much damage, in my case the ensuing heart attack would be sufficient that I would die of fright anyway, so it would be irrelevant how bad the bloody spider's bite is.

So, armed with (what I later found out was) the flying insect spray, I persued my nemisis across the lounge room floor. To its credit it did try to exit via the sliding glass door. Now had it been any other night, I could have openned the door for it with a broom handle because that flyscreen door is never locked and it could have left safely. But because we are in the middle of the second ice age here in Queensland at that moment, the door was closed and locked... Also you remember I mentioned the running and the jumping of the spider! Yeah I wasn't getting any closer than the distance of the spray range of the can.

I was wondering why the spider seemed totally unaffected by my profuse spaying, when Great Grandpa finally appeared on the scene from the garage... I bring him up to speed on events to date, he looks at the can and explains to me I'm using fly spray!

I may have grabbed the can in a bit of a hurry without checking to see which one I picked up! Brown, spider, brown carpet, I really didn't want to lose sight of it and spend the next week wondering exactly when and where it might decide to turn up again. Great Grandpa drops his head, shaking it back and forth in disbelief and returns with the correct spray.

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By now Gigantor, (yes I've named it we've been together quite a while now), has hiked quite briskly up the sliding glass door and is checking out my curtains, so Great Grandpa lets him have it with the correct spray. Allegedly! When we last saw the Gigantor he was heading in behind the side curtains, looking only very slightly worse for wear but certanly still well and truly capable of both running and jumping, much faster than the 87 year old.

However, by this time it was only minutes until @aggroed's crypto currency panel was about to start, so I grabbed a fresh coffee and bolted to my bedroom, because it was cold, that's where my laptop was (and Gigantor wasn't) , squeezed myself into my bed between the 3 grandchildren and logged on with minutes to spare.

So that was how I came to be up and very wide awake at 2:00 am and was actually able to attend the panel live! Albeit while sharing a rather cramped bed with 3 grandchildren (one of whom kicks, a lot), albeit still not knowing the whereabouts of Gigantor, and firmly convinced it was, still very much alive, and possibly quite irritated, and sharing the lounge room with Great Grandpa, now snoring in his recliner chair.

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However, the larger but much less amusing positive from this evenings (should I say mornings) fiasco, was that I learned heaps I didn't know about the websites covered by the panel. Especially I found it useful to get their individual view points on these sites, which is something you can't learn from resarching the sites yourself.

Also it was good to hear how other people handle the challenges of actively trading crypto currencies, and the indicies they use and the values they give them when making their investment decisions. So thanks so much to @aggroed, @choogirl, @followbtcnews and @scaredycatguide from minnows like myself who find it difficult to line up all their ducks and get them in a row, let alone make sence of what those ducks are quacking about.

Thanks for reading...