Wonderful and Ick

This is wonderful......

It is FINALLY cooling off here and I'm so ready for fall it's not even funny. Last week it was in the low 90's with unbearable humidity it was just nasty! This cooler weather is so welcomed.

What comes with the cooler weather though? The Ick part... I found this waiting for me when I got home from taking Devin to daycare.

This guy is HUGE! his body is the size of my thumb nail and his leg span is the size of my palm. With fall comes the creepy crawlies. I remember growing up in AZ that people would string the fake spider webs at Halloween time. I always thought that was the stuff made up from haunted houses and Halloween marketing ploys to make things look scary. Then when I moved here I realized that there really are spiders that spin webs that large. Every year I end up with quite a few 3' webs outside my house. It's really cool to watch them make the webs - of course I promptly kill them when they're done but that's the way it goes. Now this guy looks scary and menacing but after a Google search to see if he was nasty or not the verdict was he's just a garden spider that eats big bugs and is harmless to people. So he MAY get to keep his happy home from now. He is on the front of my garage directly in front of where I park and where I walk to come in the house so we'll see how badly he gives me the heeby geebies. While on my Google spider quest I read about the bad spiders here in NC - Black widows and Brown Recluse. I'm so used to Black widows from growing up in AZ that they don't squick me out - now I don't mess with them but they don't freak me out. However a spider who's bite can require a trip to the ER to have skin cut out is just nasty! Reading all that made me not want to put my feet down under my desk.

Happy Fall everyone!