Attack of the Spider

I have, surprisingly, not been harassed mercilessly by Matt about nearly killing George with my deadly pasta. I fully expect to meet a total stranger on my next trip to a big city that knows the story, though. I think he told everyone he knew.

Today’s Exploit:

I noticed some spider nests in the upper corners of my doorway a while ago, just before Cupcake came to visit. She was overjoyed by the fact that I had spiky egg-sacs living in both corners. She would stand about 3.2 feet away and eye them suspiciously before sprinting through the door as fast as she could while Arley held it open for her. I would have made her open the door herself. 

Anyway, I decided that I should probably move the nests to some place else, because I didn’t want spiders hatching all over my door and getting into my house. I have enough of them hanging out in there already. 

I prepared myself with a piece of cardboard and a piece of sand paper, because those are the required spider catching materials. Then I took a deep breath at tried to gently remove the egg-sacs from the corner.

It turns out that Widows (I now know that Widows can be identified by their spiky egg-sacs) do not make delicate webs and egg-sacs. They make something more along the lines of scratchy-sticky wool/kevlar nests that do not like to let go. So I scraped a little harder with my cardboard, the sand paper held up to catch anything I dislodged. 

Suddenly I did dislodge something, something that hit the sand paper, rolled down it and flew of with a trajectory to my exposed cleavage (this is Texas people, and Texas is HOT! I wear the smallest tanks I can find when I am not “really” in public and standing outside my front door does not count as public). Luckily it hit me and bounced off landing about a foot away from my foot. I squeaked and did a panic dance and then started to investigate. 

My attacker was not large, considering I had a pet Black Widow with a body about the size of a quarter living in my garage (that might be a slight exaggeration, but not by much). But she was brown, with dots and swirls on her back. AND SHE HAD AN ORANGE HOURGLASS! This beast is a Brown Widow, which the internet says are more poisonous but less aggressive than their black sisters. Naturally I had to go get my camera and take some nice photos to prove that I wasn’t making this story up.

After retrieving my camera I chased her around my breezeway trying to get not-blurry photos. Naturally she came to and was being quite feisty by the time I had my camera and would not cooperate with me when I tried to take a picture of her belly. 

After torturing her in this manner for about 5.7 minutes I carted her, on my sand paper, over to the dumpster and released her, shortly to be followed by her egg-sacs, which are not near as fragile as most of those I’ve seen. 

Then I went back to remove the second nest from the doorway. This removal went much smoother, and I discovered that it also housed a Brown Widow. Which I’m told is pretty rare, Matt couldn’t believe that I’d actually seen two together, and that they were both nesting in my doorway.

As soon as I finished moving the nests I went and requested that the pest removal guy come take care of my doorway, and spray for the ants on my porch while he’s at it.