The uneasy (and unlikely) live-and-let-live agreement between me and the large cellar spider in my bathroom ended last night. In retrospect, I really should have seen this coming.
A week or so ago, another (somewhat smaller) cellar spider appeared in the same corner. It looked kind of menacing, and it wandered a little too close to the shower for my liking, and besides, one was enough. I smashed the interloper, receiving no thanks at all from the incumbent spider. I promptly forgot the whole incident.
It seems rather clear now that my “he” spider is actually a “she”, and I didn’t smash an interloper, I smashed a recent suitor. On Friday morning, just out of the shower, I looked up and thought I saw the spider enjoying a nice, big meal. A big motionless blob was in her jaws. It didn’t look like it was wrapped in silk, though, so I took a closer look. Yup, it was a big blob of spider eggs. I remembered reading that the female carries her egg sac around in her jaw parts until they hatch. I also remembered that the sac could consist of 100 or more eggs.
Imagining 100 little Pholcus Phalangioides infants swarming my bathroom was a little too much to take. Each of the little buggers might live one to three years, provided it wasn’t eaten by a brother or sister during a famine. If I could have separated mom from the egg case, I would have done so and given the eggs a nice new home wherever my flush toilet might carry them. However, she was quite attached to them. Just as I started thinking about transplanting the whole mess outside somewhere, I finally recovered my sanity and remembered it was just a damned spider and didn’t I hate the things to begin with? My bathroom is now spider-free, until such time as the next tenant moves in.
It’s been a nice, quiet weekend. We went to a new barbecue place for dinner last night, and it was horrible. The sauce was as sweet as pancake syrup, just disgusting. At least now we know. We then went to see “The Day After Tomorrow” at the local cinema. Apparently the median IQ of the crowd at our showing was higher than average, because most of the silly, unlikely phenomena brought peals of laughter. The highlight of the show was when theatre management came barging in, with two police officers and a security rent-a-cop in tow, and hauled off a pair of underage drunks, one of whom had just emptied his stomach onto the gentleman in front of him.
Tomorrow begins another week of work, and another week of exploring options, trying to be prepared for the inevitable … things are looking bleak around the office, and there is an air of futility about.
For now, I’m going to go eat a nice dinner, watch some TV, and escape the rest of the world for a while. Look for an update tomorrow!