Spider Time

So, I pledged a whole blog section about spiders, but apparently, there is only ONE post tagged with spiders. This is wrong. I have seen some good ones lately, including this one on a stop sign near my place.



I saw another big one a month ago or so. A couple was looking at it. Can you see it?

Lookie What I Found!

It's a big ol' bug, just hanging out by my apartment.


What kind of bug is this?

And here is a video with my shoe in there for perspective. My shoe is a size 10 hiking shoe cuz of my ginormous feet.

Spiders in the Rain

I have always disliked spiders, but as I age, the fear gets dimmer. When I was 14, there was a huge spider in my bedroom which I ran from and made my parents kill. I wasn't able to sleep in my room for days. Some time passed and I told my first therapist about my fear. A few months after that, I saw a garden spider on my ceiling, which was about 4 or 5 feet from the bed I was lying on at the time. I grabbed a shoe, killed the thing, and went back to bed.

When I first moved to San Ramon, I noticed that massive webs with "big ol'" spiders seemed to be pretty normal. As long as there is enough distance or a window between me and the spider, I love staring at them in the atriums of the buildings at work. In my old apartment, there was a time when I killed a massive spider at least once a week, but this apartment doesn't have as many. Earlier this month, I saw a smaller, but still pretty large spider crawling on my bed while I was getting ready for work. It was too big to smush with my hands, so I grabbed a TV remote and managed to smack it. Call me the Spider Killer, I guess, but its only when they come into my dwelling.

This spider was on a light pole outside my place last week. That was when I decided that I want to document my 8-legged finds. I hope you'll enjoy the series. My morbid fascination with spiders definitely aids in overcoming the somewhat irrational fear.

The Moth

It might as well have been Mothra. Sunday night around 10pm, I saw a big ol’ moth on the wall, near the ceiling, above my bed. It had to go – I wasn’t about to sleep with a moth that big just sitting there – but it was huge. Smacking it with the fly swatter would kill it, but it would also produce a giant moth corpse that would fall to my bed. This was also not acceptable. So I slept on my couch Sunday night, but not before opening my bedroom window shade to let in the most amount of light so the moth would move.

I realized that moths, big moths, are more like small animals than bugs. A bug can be smashed, wiped up in a tissue, but a moth will leave a corpse. It is like having a tiny bird in my room – I can’t kill it, yet I am too afraid of it to get that close to it. Around 5am, I saw that it had moved to the vent above the door into my bedroom. At that point, I could swat it with the fly swatter. It did fall, but on the ground, and I scooped it up with the swatter and put it in the garbage. I don't like big bugs, and though I did grow up out in the country, they were thankfully a rarity back home.