Wednesday, June 4, 2008

My New Friend


This is my new friend. He's kinda creepy actually. He's pretty big and gave me a surprise the first time I saw him just chillin' on my front porch. I was trying to get a close-up picture of him, but failed due to me being a big baby. I'm not at all squeamish about bugs, but after seeing how fast this spider moves, I had visions of it latching onto my face after annoying it with a flashing camera. It didn't help that when I was trying to take his picture, I could see the glare from his eyes. Yikes! So my husband was kind enough to get closer and get a closer picture for me. As you can see in the photo, our spider is currently consuming a large moth.

I was concerned that the spider may be poisonous so I looked it up and discovered that it's not. You can never be too careful with kids around. Especially since it lives on the front porch. Turns out it's a species (of which there are 100) of fishing spider. So I'll just let him live on the porch rent free. He seems happy hunting.

Also, I discovered a deer tick on my leg yesterday. Not cool. My daughter got Lyme disease from a deer tick and it was awful. She's fine and recovered now thankfully. So now I gotta keep an eye on my leg for the telltale bullseye rash. My yard scares me.

3 comments:

Paula Gardner said...

I need to know where you live so that I never move there by accident! There's no way I could let a big spider like that live on my porch...he would have to die. He looks like the kind with glowing red eyes and fangs dripping human blood.

Keely said...

Yikes! Shudder - I'm with Paula - at my house he'd have been dead and the porch would have spider spray all over it. I really REALLY dislike spiders. It may have something to do with the fact that we have a species around here that bites me every now and then (when I forget to put on shoes and wander outside at night) and ends up with me at the doctor's. And it's not the one poisonous spider NZ has either.

Janine said...

YUCK! Man I hate spiders! You're actually going to leave it there? Matt got a weird lump on his shoulder that was infected and it was a spider bite. He had to take antibiotics. Be careful! Even if it's not poisonous it could still bite. He is pretty amazing though. I let a black snake live under our front stoop one whole summer and people thought I was crazy. So, I kinda understand. But a huge spider??!!! Time to get books out from the library about spiders!