Arachnophilia Bill and I adore spiders. I've been trying to photograph them lately, but they're pretty hard to get good shots of. It's helps when they are HUGE, though, as was this one I found Saturday in the cogpit (where the main gears are) of the grist mill I do some milling at.

The first picture is not-so-great, but is there for scale. There were two of these giants in the 'pit, each one about as big as the palm of my hand. The second picture shows the other one. I kept trying to show the people walking by the mill how cool they were; as you might expect, the reaction was quite varied :) One woman really ticked me off by insisting her 6-year old (who was clearly indifferent to the spiders) was 'terrified' of spiders. I wanted to shake her and tell her that if she kept telling the kid that enough it would eventually be true! Talk about projecting your own tastes to your children!

Maybe there's some evolutionary point to systematically teaching kids to loathe spiders, but I think we're sort of beyond that now - or should be.

But I wasn't meaning to go all preachy :) just to put up some cute spider pics. The third picture is our 'kitchen spider', who has lived in the same spot by our kitchen window right above/behind the sink for nearly a year. Like us, she isn't the tidiest of housekeepers - although she does periodically clean out the carcasses. She had a big kill last week, as you can see! A moth and a fly and ... maybe a miniature Hobbit ;-) Architechturally, she's no Frank Lloyd Wright, as she seems to prefer the 'crazy tangled mass' of web construction. But it works for her, I guess!
    ¶ 3:17 AM