we just got back from a stunning, glorious beach weekend... boogie boarding, pizza, naps, remote-control cars, board games and books. all the important ingredients. and while i process the photos, this pair of happy mutts will show you how i feel.
... if you are a non-predatory arthropod. for one thing, there are a lot of predatory arthropods around. we have hundreds, if not thousands, of what they call 'daddy longlegs' here (Pholcus phalangioides according to the Te Papa spider page).
we get the occasional white-tail (Lampona sp.), one of the only poisonous spiders in the whole country - came over from australia, of course. this one turned up in the kitchen sink this morning.
i tried to get a video of the window spider taking a fly i tossed into her web this afternoon (call me sadistic, but he did buzz so delightfully frantically), but she was too fast. the best i could do was snatch a shot of her beforehand.
i guess it would also be dangerous to live in my house if you were arachnophobic.
it's not my fault. i can explain everything. after my all-too-informal references to the hedgehog gods, a small but spiky army tricked the cat into letting them in, marched up the stairs, and bore me away into the night to do penance. on a small but mobile sea of pincushions, i was brought before Their Most Divine Pricklinesses. luckily the journey had taken us through dense underbrush, and i was able to surreptititiously pocket a large number of juicy, crunchy snails along the way, which mollified and distracted the assembly long enough for me to steal away unnoticed, in spite of zebra-striped pajamas.
actually, i was on the moon, with steve.
and from our lunar hideaway, although largely beyond the reach of the interweb, i was able to finally get this paper submitted and make some other thesis progress. i also managed a few earthside interludes, during which we hiked the tongariro crossing again, visited family and crazy dogs in nelson, and i did a marine mammal medic course that prepares me to assist at future whale strandings.
also, it's summer in new zealand, which looks like this:
... so i confess that mustering the motivation to spend time inside on a computer has been more difficult than usual, and that the aformentioned indoor time has been largely spent thesising in order to rationalize having earned a few more hours outside. (and, er, playing scrabulous. evil, evil scrabulous.) my new mountain bike from the pebbles has been an added distraction - so fast! so red and shiny! - but i tell myself that anything that moves me further away from the troglodyte end of the spectrum is probably a good thing.
but look, i came back just in time to notice that this site is one year old tomorrow. and as one of the inaugural posts was about our local household spiders, of which we once again have a considerable and diverse population, perhaps i will manage to get together some more spidery goodness to share. bet you can't wait.
