It's Been a Busy Week

And it just keeps getting busier. I wish I had some deep spiritual insight to share with you, but really, all I can come up with is this, which I hope at least entertains you. It's an excerpt from an email I wrote to my brother, who is a helicopter pilot currently serving in Iraq:

Out on the back porch, we have a spider. No big deal, right? Well, she first appeared in the skylight right above the steps down and out of the kitchen. Again, no big deal. EXCEPT . . . she is a rather large, Golden Orb spider. Not dangerous or anything, but she is about the size of a computer mouse when her legs are extended. She wove quite the web, and even had two egg sacs in it. We have kind of a symbiotic relationship with her, and we call her Charlotte. Charlotte eats the bugs that would fly into our house, and we let her live in the skylight. We saw her eating a horsefly the other day, and it was kind of gross and fascinating at the same time – like a car wreck. You can’t turn away but it’s wigging you out.

Recently, when we saw two egg sacs, we decided Charlotte should be relocated. Not that we’re prejudiced against arachnids or anything – we just thought that having a couple zillion spiders hatching from those eggs might be a bad idea for our back porch. So Hunk 'O Man took the egg sacs and put them in the herb garden. He moved Charlotte to the skylight that’s over above the guinea pig cage. It’s about 5 feet away.

Man oh man, was she ticked. She even looked ticked. Charlotte was decidedly NOT a happy camper. She crawled right out of the skylight (apparently it wasn’t clean enough for her), and set up shop on the ceiling of the porch. Now she has strung a web that reaches about 5 feet from the ceiling to the brick beside the kitchen window. This girl is not messing around. She’s going to have every bug between here and the Atlantic coastline caught in that colossal web. Yep, that’s our Charlotte.

xoxox