My employer failed to make my payroll deposit again today. I know this because my bank called this morning to tell me I’m overdrawn. Nice.

I was thinking this morning about spiders. Spiders and I do not get along well. I’ve always had an irrational fear of spiders; arachnophobia would be the correct term, I guess. When I was a kid, seeing a big spider would send me running the other way, bowling over anything that happened to be in my path. I’ve gotten a bit better as an adult. Now, instead of running, I find the nearest heavy object and attempt to turn the spider into homogenized goo.

Certain spiders bother me more than others. Wolf spiders are near the top of the list, and I used to see lots of those when I lived in an old farmhouse in the mid-1980s. I didn’t sleep well in that house. I used to see lots of spiders when I was a radio engineer, taking care of a transmitter site that was a perfect spider habitat … five totally uninhabited buildings which were visited at most once a day.

A couple of years ago, I was bitten by what doctors believe was a brown recluse spider, one of the truly dangerous spiders indigenous to this part of the US. The bite left an ugly ulcer that took two or three months to heal.

Only a year ago, I encountered my first wild tarantula while driving around in south Texas. It was so big, I could have thrown an unabridged copy of Webster’s Dictionary at it and it would have thrown the thing back at me with a laugh. I would have run over it, but its fangs might have blown a tire.

Yes, I hate spiders, absolutely hate them, and I doubt that I’ll ever feel all cuddly about them the way pet spider owners do.

The strangest thing has happened recently, though.

The only spiders we see in our current house with regularity are what’s called “daddy longlegs” spiders. (Ours specifically are members of family Pholcidae, specifically “Pholcus phalangioides”. They’re sometimes called cellar spiders.) They appear mainly in the bathroom where I shower each morning, taking up residence in a corner by the ceiling.

I have been told by our exterminator that I should leave these spiders alone, because if I manage to eradicate them, the population of other types of spiders will likely explode. The long-legged fellows, apparently, love to dine on other spiders, and the enemy of my enemy should be my friend, even if he looks a lot like the enemy. That’s the theory, anyway. I have personally seen these guys subdue very large insects, and I have indeed found the carcasses of some really menacing looking spiders in the longlegs’ webs, so I guess there’s some truth to it.

Most of the time, the spiders eventually wander a little too close to the shower or sink, and meet their demise. So long as they stay in their little corner and keep their distance, I tend to ignore them. They really don’t bother me as much as some other spiders do, although I have no idea why. I’d hate to have one crawling on me, but at a distance they’re really not so offensive.

A few weeks ago, a medium-sized spider appeared in the corner. I left him alone. Over the next few days, it stayed there, and seemed to be getting a steady diet of small flies, small spiders, and other arthropods. It got bigger very quickly. I grew fascinated. One night, while I was doing nature’s bidding, I looked up and noticed the spider had caught a small moth. I watched in fascination. It didn’t bite the moth right away, it simply started throwing silk. Pretty soon it had wrapped the moth in a solid coccoon of silk, totally immobilizing it. It then approached from another angle and made a little hole in the silk, then bit once and backed away. A few moments later, it closed in again and began to eat. I’d never seen this process up-close before, it was amazing.

The spider is still there, and we’ve kept up this uneasy truce. He stays in his corner, and I leave him be. He gets a bit more active in the morning when I’m showering … perhaps the steamy air gives him some needed moisture. In spite of my fear and loathing of spiders in general, it’s almost as though I’d miss this one if I went to the shower one morning and he wasn’t there. Of course, I’d also wonder where he’d gone and whether I’d encounter him in closer quarters later on, unexpectedly.

I’ve read up on these spiders. The females can live for three years, but only indoors. They originated in the tropics and could not survive winter in most parts of the US. The males live for one year … they reach sexual maturity at that age, mate once, and then die. The female doesn’t kill or eat the male, he just stays close by and expires when his work is done. I was amazed to find that spiders even live as long as a year. It seems an incredibly long life span for something so small.

Whether it’s a sign of insanity or just a sign of deeper understanding, I don’t know. I’m not going to go so far as to name it, but I’m going to let the spider stay as long as he wants, so long as he stays out of my way. It’s actually kind of fun to watch him feed, tend his web, and grow.

Things at home are quiet, for the moment. Alexis meets with her counselor again tonight, and her probation officer has asked to be present. The highlight of our last counseling session was her assertion that lying is “basically OK”. Also Yvette went into her room today and found, written in indelible marker over most of her furniture, the words “I HATE SCOTT”. It just makes me feel all warm inside.