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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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How I spent my summer vacation... There are a lot of giant Shelobs in the ceiling of the basement at the cabin. You can count dozens and dozens without even turning your head. They are dark brown and sort of glisteny, really big and muscular and they just sit around guarding their egg sacks, of which there are hundreds. You have to go in the basement because lots of important things are down there, like the water heater, the pump, the wheel barrow, seasonal dampness that needs to be monitored, etc. I have made a kind of uneasy peace with the basement arachnid population because they don't move around much and so long as I crouch all the time I'm down there and don't actually brush my head against them, they don't get in my hair. This year we were puttering around in the basement for a little while, doing this and that and marvelling at all the critters. But when I came up out of the basement into the forest ... horrors! There was a giant spider on the back of my shoulder. I flailed around for a little while with a elevated heart rate saying stuff like "Ah! Ah! Ah!" and "Is it off me?! Is it off me?!" Once I'd calmed down, the real severity of the situation set in. If those spiders in the basement ceiling were now prone to dropping down onto passersby below, then I was going to have a problem fulfilling all my occasional duties as a member of the custodial team for the property. Several hours later, however, I noted another big spider climbing on a tree outside. It was the same kind of spider as the one that had been on my back.  As you can clearly see from the diagram above, the basement spiders and the outside spiders are totally different species. While they are roughly the same size, the inside ones, as mentioned above, are dark brown, and their limbs are hard-edged and well-defined. The outside ones are light grey and their legs are sort of feathery. The one that was on me probably dropped down from the outside wall as I was exiting the basement. The upshot of the story: I can still go into the basement to check on things because I actually have no new evidence that basement spiders will drop off the ceiling into my hair. Also, nobody bit me. Uneasy interspecies peace restored! |