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Today's Creepy Crawlies
Sunday, 2005 May 29 - 11:45 pm
Yard work; French lessons; eBay. That's the extent of today's news.

Today I did yard work. I pulled up about a thousand weeds. I think I'm finally starting to make a dent, though I'm quite certain that only a thorough dose of nuclear waste would be enough to kill everything off properly. Still, my efforts should keep the neighborhood lawn police at bay for at least few weeks.

One lesson about pulling up weeds: when you do so, don't just leave them in a pile by your house. Because, weeks later, when you go to actually bag them for disposal, you might find that an entire ecosystem of creepy crawly things has developed in the pile. I discovered: one snake, three different colonies of ants, a few dozen millipedes, and four different kinds of spiders. The snake didn't bother me; I'm pretty okay with reptiles. I picked him up and moved him off to a safer location. But one of the spiders was alarming. It was about four centimeters long, and it had a bright Carolina-blue abdomen. You gotta think that spiders only carry bright blue abdomens if they're trying to advertise their lethalness. I thought about capturing it so I could photograph it, but I thought better of it. Does anyone know what this kind of spider is? It's still running around somewhere underneath my house, so maybe I should find out.

I also learned a little more French today. Did you know that les oiseaux volent? It's so exciting! My only questions with the French lessons is, when do we get to the kissing part? Or the toast?

In the evening I did some eBaying. I bought an old Dell PC for $100 (an Optiplex Small-Form-Factor GX150, 1.1 GHz Pentium III), just to use for working at home. I've been using Virtual PC on my Mac for this purpose, but having a real PC makes it somewhat easier; and besides, those bastards at Microsoft haven't updated Virtual PC to work with Mac OS X 10.4 yet. Of course, the problem with all this is that I'm introducing yet another computer into my home. At least this one is pretty small.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and I plan to honor our veterans by drinking beer and eating burgers, just like a good American should. Hooray!
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Posted by Ken in: life

Comments

Comment #1 from Nicholas (Guest)
2005 May 30 - 7:03 am : #
We would need a better desciption of the spider. Was it like a wolf spider, a jumping spider or a web spider. Probably not a web spider at that size. Made me think of my favorite spider.

http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/StratfordLandingES/Ecology/mpages/black_and_yellow_argiope.htm

My crawl space is filled with black widows. No big deal, though they are not my favorite.

Here is a spider ID site.
http://kaston.transy.edu/
Comment #2 from Ken (realkato)
2005 May 30 - 11:40 pm : #
It was thick-legged and kinda hairy, like a wolf spider. It moved pretty slowly. Its abdomen wasn't that big, perhaps just a centimeter in length. The closest thing I've found that matches the description is a "mouse spider", but I'm not sure if that's what it was.
Comment #3 from MonoCerdo (Guest)
2005 May 31 - 10:48 am : #
Bravo avec les leçons de français! C'est vrai que les oiseaux volent. Ha ha.

Si tu as des questions, demande-les moi et j'essaierais de t'aider.

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