Best Seat In The Yard

My ambitious plans for pursuing a meaningful blip today were derailed by an aptly named giant house spider (T. gigantea).

Today being laundry day, I thought I'd start with the bedding. When I went to get the sheets off my bed, I found Mr. Gigantea UNDER MY PILLOW! This, about 40 minutes after I'd gotten up. This is the second time that this has happened and I'm not the least bit amused by it. I've tried really, really hard to not think about where this monster was while I was enjoying sleeping in on a rainy Saturday morning.

These spiders are just too big to squish, so I caught him in one of the large plastic cups I have all over the house for just such a purpose. I took him to the local farm supply store thinking someone there might verify my identification of him. I'm slightly wary of the poisonous hobo spider which also visits occasionally and I can't tell one big spider from another. We, being myself and three employees at the farm store, determined that it wasn't a hobo spider.

In the process of identification we discovered, interestingly,that the giant house spider will kill a hobo spider. That fact doesn't encourage me to raise them or even keep the ones I find, but it's nice to know. After that, I didn't feel right about killing him, so I let him go in the bushes about three miles from where I live and I'm confident that if he finds his way back he'll be too weak to care about coming in the house.

So, instead of a pleasant day spent with the camera, oh I don't know, down by the water or up in the hills, maybe in the park, I ripped the entire bedroom apart knowing full well that if there was another spider he/she would be so well hidden I'd never find him/her. Fortunately, I can always count on the squirrel population to provide a blip.