Caught in a web

Spiders here are noteworthy. Mostly because they are impressive - impressively jumpy, impressively large, impressively venomous and impressively abundant. I have always taken a 'just let them be' stance but that gets a little trickier here. If they are so venomous that it could be fatal but will likely keep to themselves do you still just let them be? On the other hand if you decide to kill the redback it is a little nerve racking. What if you miss, which, realistically, given spiders' cunning getaways, happens most of the time. Then you have a venomous and angry spider in your house. So I generally try to ignore them but it is difficult when they insist on living places like my children's scooters. 

We also have a resident huntsman in our roof rack. These are completely harmless except also frighteningly large and beefy looking. It is hard to kill a creature when you know they are benign so I have let this spider coexist with us. At a cost though. About once a month the huntsman will decide to come out and crawl across the windshield. This is of course always done while I am driving. It never ceases to scare me to no end. Especially that time it decided to walk across the driver side window and before my brain remembered it was on the other side of the window I yelled and gesticulated in fright. My gesticulation was exuberant enough that my elbow knocked the gear shift putting me in neutral. Thankfully I wasn't so exuberant as to knock myself into park.

With all the spiders comes an even more insidious byproduct: spider webs. There are webs everywhere. I was feeling a little bad about how many webs there were in our yard until I paid more attention and realised it wasn't me. These Australian spiders are crazy web builders. They just don't stop. Their web artistry can only be described as avant garde. I can remove a labyrinth of webs and within a few hours it is back. It is a lose lose game me and the spiders play. 

Zadie in a web (well, a disc golf basket)