Life With Spidey

It seems we spoke too soon-- not two days after posting the blog about that spider being gone, "taken care of", whatever... he's reappeared back in our building. Except this time he's decided to set up camp right outside our apartment.

Needless to say, it wasn't a very pleasant surprise to come home from work Monday night and find that Huntsman-- bigger than we remembered, actually-- just chilling out in the ceiling corner right across the hall from our apartment door.

Now, it might be hard to get a good perspective from these photos (it's difficult to take pictures when shaking with fear!) but you may notice the blob of light on the spider (click on the first photo for a chilling close-up)-- yup, it's big enough that its eyes reflect the camera flash. Yikes!

Since no amount of convincing could get Adrian to kill it ("It's got bones! It's like killing a kitten!" he says. Well, if a kitten came in through a vent we wouldn't mind so much.), and Dayle was too afraid it might leap if she tried to whack it with the mop, we pulled out the next best solution-- the masking tape. Unfortunately for us, Oz houses/apartments have a very strange architectural feature in nearly every room: bare slots/vents in the concrete walls placed close to the ceilings, presumably for air flow. Whoever came up with this idea was obviously unconcerned with the critters which might sneak in (some of you may remember a time when a Huntsman wandered into our caravan, through a similar air vent in the door?). And so, while it may seem frivolous to pack masking tape on a trip around the world, it has sure come in handy in desperate times like these.

So between our guilt and fear preventing the murder of our new neighbour, Adrian's other motive for keeping old Spidey around is a new harebrained theory that maybe the critter can help us predict the weather-- perhaps a little crazy, but we have noticed our spider friend hanging out on one wall when it's sunny, another on a rainy day, and upside down on the ceiling when it's windy. [Though maybe we could figure this out by looking out the window, ahem.] And while we do keep willing our spider friend to kindly exit the premises and continue his creepy ways OUTSIDE, we feel a little bad for him. Perhaps he's terrified of getting swept away by the gale-force winds we've had all week-- winds that have pushed our new balcony plants into a slant and have carried away (without any trace) an empty bag of potting soil and a tray of birdseed we'd left on the balcony. We don't really want flying Huntsmans now, do we?