On a recent Wednesday morning in advance of writing an advance column, I ventured outside to do a couple of menial backyard tasks before sitting down to my computer.
I had no sooner set foot on the back deck when I was suddenly enveloped in a sticky, filmy substance that my primitive brain recognized as a cobweb and my more sophisticated and uber dramatic brain identified as the biggest cobweb ever seen.
Almost simultaneously my peripheral vision tracked a large, dark and looming object to my right and instinctively I swatted to protect my jugular with the only tool at my disposal, the little garbage bag in my hand that was headed for the bin.
As I narrowly made my escape down the steps, I had two concurrent thoughts: that’s cardio done for the day, and that spider camped out at the corner of the house must have moved to a new spot on the umbrella.
To reassure myself that this was indeed the case and these horrific, giant and likely life-sucking spiders are not exponentially multiplying, I carefully ventured back up the steps for a closer look.
I was of course horrified to see that there were in fact two spiders in residence on our residence (and those are just the ones I happened to notice!).
The original one, which I have left undisturbed under my “you stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours,” policy is the larger of the two, but now the new one has managed to breach the limits of what is acceptable by spinning its web from........