Day 533 - My New "Pet"

One of the drawbacks of our apartment - and from what I can tell most apartments / houses here - is that we don't have screens on the windows. Bugs aren't a problem for most people, I guess, but we have them. In spades.

Our flat is directly above a restaurant and my kitchen windows look directly at the garbage area. Delightful. This means big nasty black flies in the summer. They like to hang out in gangs of 4 or 5 in my living room, menacingly circling this light.

It's disgusting.

About a month ago, I noticed some fairly elaborate webbage on one of the kitchen windows. There was a pretty weird looking spider just chilling out. I - unlike Sirhan Sirhan - have no problem killing flies, but I'm not very good at it. My new method is using the hose attachment on the vacuum cleaner. This is probably a bad idea.

Maybe this little guy / gal could be put to work killing all of the flies for me?! My spider friend gets a nice home and I get dead flies. It's a no-brainer.

Then this happened.



I'm not quite sure what our little friend is doing here. Is it eating? Is it preparing some sort of egg? Is it pregnant? Do spiders even lay eggs? Will my home now be infested with spiders? What is that giant thing on its back?

The spider looks even weirder now. Like crab pincers popping out of the big back thing. Note, in case that last paragraph didn't make it painfully obvious, I know nothing about spiders.

I am at a crossroads with my spider friend. There are no flies in the apartment, so that's good. This is a creepy spider. Maybe if I gave it a name I would feel more comfortable. My Grandma took me to see Arachnophobia when I was 12. Hopefully this won't happen.



Yes, I went with my Grandma to see Arachnophobia. I'm also pretty sure that's Happy Gilmore's Grandma in the bed.