Spider!

Xopher has kindly lent me the digital camera that he hasn't used since his sister gave him after she found that she wasn't using it... So it's been two years since anyone used it.

It's quite cool. After some initial futzing about with settings and the book and the battery and so on, I used it to take a picture -- of a giant spider!


Waaargh!

This giant spider was originally in my room. Since I hate spiders in my room, I sprayed it with some bug spray. Actually, I sprayed it with a lot of bug spray. It dropped down behind one of my book cases, and I figured, no problem. It would take a few minutes to die and I would come across its giant corpse at some future stage.

But it didn't die. It hauled itself from behind the bookcase, out of my room, down the hallway, into the hallway cupboard briefly, back out into the kitchen, around behind the oven and back out again. I spent the whole time convinced that it would crawl behind something and have the fucking decency to die, but no. I finally got sick of not knowing where it might start crawling from next, and decided to scare it out onto the patio and then the garden.

By this time, I was kind of awed by its tenacity, and completely unwilling to either poison it further or squash it. (For one thing, it would have left a hell of a mess. And what if it still didn't die? A zombie, half-crushed spider would have even more reason to menace me.)

So I grabbed a handy broom and started thumping the ground near by, at which point it reared up on its back legs and exposed its fucking huge bitey spider jaws. I went to get the camera, and spent the next ten minutes or so trying to photograph it near something to show scale. There are more photos, but this is the least blurry of them.

This is easily the biggest spider I ever saw that wasn't safely in a zoo somewhere. Last time I saw it, it was heading into the garden. The rate it moves, it could well be back in my room by now... Freaky!

Also: I'm going to take the job. I give two weeks' notice on Monday. They're not giving me LWOP, even though I did my best to talk them into it. "Their loss," is a fairly common reaction to this news. Exciting new job! Did I mention it's the same place that Dave works? I don't think he even knows yet...