The suburban jungle…
Yes, this is your first glimpse of our new house. Isn’t it cute? I just love the brick. The house is narrow but it goes back pretty far. Ma Snook took this picture when she came down to help us move a few weeks ago. (That’s me looking particularly unattractive on the right, and the Snook himself peering out of the front door.) I’m hoping to get indoor photos taken soon, as soon as we get the last of the new furniture and hang up all our pictures.

Okay, see, that’s where the post was supposed to end. Instead we now have to talk about something scary: spiders. I’m not a fan. In fact, I’ve been developing a rather severe case of arachnophobia since we moved. See, all the most poisonous beasties in the world are here in Australia. Most of them, the snakes and jellyfish and stuff, don’t live in the middle of the city and I don’t have to worry about them. The spiders, however, do. And some of them are downright nasty. (Last week at the Slashdot meetup, even the most hardened lifelong Sydneysiders admitted to being petrified of funnel web spiders.) In our nice little modern apartment, I didn’t even think about creepy crawlies. Now we live in an old house, a house with street-level entrances and a back garden. I think about them. I especially think about them when I go out to the shed to do the laundry. I just know they’re going to be in there. Anyway, this is all background information. The point of all this rambling is…

This bastard crawled across my hand tonight. It’s a Huntsman spider, which is technically supposed to be one of the harmless ones. It was still frickin’ huge and hairy and scary though. I was out on the front porch moving the trash and recycling bins out onto the curb. I reached for the recycling bin and suddenly this thing was crawling over my hand. I seriously jumped, like, three feet straight backwards and started shaking my arms like mad. (There may have been some screaming, but to be honest, I’ve blacked most of it out.) I ended up on the sidewalk with the spider sitting on the welcome mat looking at me. I had no idea what kind it was, nor whether it would bite me if further provoked. So I did the only thing I could do… I stood there and yelled for Snookums to come rescue me. He showed up and explained that it was harmless, and then proceeded to bash it with a newspaper since I was still hyperventilating. Dude, I can still feel it. I have a feeling my phobia’s only going to get worse.

Do you share my pain? Or are you a friend to the eight-legged freaks?