Gather 'round kiddies. Let me spin you the tale of what it's like over here in good ol' lala land this time of year.
First of all, here in Cali, we don't have a lot of variation in the wildlife... at least not in this part of it... because pretty much the whole thing is desert. But, what we lack in variation, we make up for in quantity. Truly, especially in the summer months, there is no shortage of four things: coyotes, lizards, mosquitoes, and spiders.
Oooooh the spiders.
Again, we don't have a lot of variation in our spider species, but what we do have is some of the worst. We have brown recluse, black widows, and camel spiders are a new addition (if you don't know what a camel spider is, it's this nightmare-inducing thing link] do you see how big this thing is? We found two in our classroom during class. I want to die apparently they migrated to Cali what did we do to deserve this).
So last night, my mother discovered that there was an orb web spider in our backyard. Now, it's sort of tradition for us to find one orb web spider every summer somewhere around our house, and we're okay with this. The orb web spiders have never tried to bother us, and create some of the most beautifully fascinating webs you'll ever see. Like, full on Charolette's web webs scitechdaily.com/images/Orb-We… it's pretty cool, and they just chill on their web. Sometimes we'll even watch them while they meticulously repair the broken strands of the web... it's fascinating.
So my mom went out to see our annual visitor in the backyard, and once she was outside, she looked up, and just in front of her over the rafters of our awning, dangled a huge black widow mother. How do we know it was a mother? Well. When my mother naturally turned to run back in the house, she looked at where she had just walked through the slider door... and saw that she had walked through aT NEWLY HATCHED NEST OF BLACK WIDOW BABIES ALL DANGLING FROM THEIR SPINDLY LITTLE WEBS ACROSS THE DOORWAY. AND WHEN THE WIND BLEW THEY WOULD SWING RIGHT INTO THE HOUSE FROM THE DOORWAY. THEY WERE JUST THERE. DOZENS OF NEWLY-BORN NIGHTMARES, SMALL ENOUGH TO CRAWL THROUGH THE HOLES OF A SCREEN DOOR, AND MY MOTHER HAD JUST WALKED RIGHT THROUGH THEM WITHOUT NOTICING.
Naturally she screamed and for the rest of the night she was combing through her hair with shaking hands as my dad came down and had to squish each and every one of the little buggers by hand.
As my mom came up to my room to relay the horror story to me, we heard a scream from my sister's room. So we walked in and what did we find?
My sister standing up on her bed, as she stared across the room at a huge brown spider on her roof.
Good.
So my dad had to come up and be the hero again... but when he went to squish the spider again, it ran across his hand, down the wall, and into the closet. He looked for it for a good 20 minutes, but it was gone.
It's somewhere in the house.
Needless to say my sister didn't sleep last night.
So I went downstairs to get some apple juice while my dad was unsuccessfully searching for the lost spider in the closet, and I looked back out to the backyard.
Guess what I found.
No. Guess.
There were more black widow babies draped across the sliding glass door.
daaaaaaaaaaad!
So after he came back out and was in the process of once again slaying the tiny little death specks, my mom pointed to the rafters above him in the backyard. She pointed to a large spot on the wood and said, "That's a black widow". My dad refused to believe it. He insisted on it being nothing more than discoloration of the wood. But, my mom insisted that she saw it run over there. For a few minutes they went back and forth, until I handed them a pole that we use to keep the door locked at night, saying they should try smacking it. My dad, insistent on proving my mother wrong, went to smack the spot on the wood...
And of course it began jumping around until it disappeared on top of the rafters.
So now that's another spider loose.
Hesitantly I went to sleep that night, and when I woke up this morning, when I went to go pee, I found my mother's sick idea of a joke hanging from the bathroom ceiling.
Screw spiders
Screw this house
Screw California
I'm moving to Canada b y e