elfination

I found another spider yesterday.  It was fairly small - maybe the legspan of a penny - all very dark brown with a light tan patch on both its cephalothorax and abdomen.  It was definitely a wolf spider, and by the size of the spinnerettes, I’d say it was a female.   I was about to step on the scale and I saw a blur go skittering over to try to hide under a bit of the wall molding.  I yelled “BLAAHHHH”, the spider tried to squush herself into the crevice further (it wasn’t working), and Barrett came in wondering what the problem was.  “Just get me a glass and a piece of paper,” I ordered.

I tried to take a picture of said spider, but my digital camera has a little problem with focusing on stuff like that.  All the pictures I got were blurry to some extent, although at least one of them DID show the coloration of the beastie.

It looked mostly like this:

And I just spent 20 minutes searching Google Images to find that picture.

Here’s the thing about spiders.  I’m fascinated by them.  Utterly.  Completely.  I can’t handle killing them, either.   I really can’t.  I feel too awful about killing spiders.  I take them outside.  But I’m totally freaked out by them, too.  (Thus the “BLAAAHHH!!”)  It weirds Barrett out also because I’ll be cool-as-a-cucumber and oh-so-calm about capturing a spider, poking it a little, photographing it, but then it’ll scurry out of its jar (as this one did last night) and I’ll lose my composure.  (”AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!”)  Then I calmly catch the thing again and the process starts all over.   Since I’m typically so cool about catching them, when I lose it, Barrett fears the worst.  Did it bite me?  Did it gnaw my arm off?  Did it bite the cat?  Do we need to go to the ER?  911?   Then there’s the rational person in Barrett that speaks up and says, “For God’s sake stop trying to take pictures of it and just let the goddamn thing go if you can’t step on it.”

Anyway.  I have to go to work because it’s Thursday/Monday so I’ll post more on this later.