Acromantulas

Well, not really.  But I know exactly how Ronald Weasley felt when he and Harry Potter tracked Aragog to his lair  (web?).

I took the Christmas lights down today.

The ones around the garage—they were relatively easy.

The dock…that’s another story.

It’s not that it was hard to remove them.  A little tricky maybe where they went around the corner and over the lamp, but I managed.  A combination of a broom handle and acrobatic skill.  Nothing spectacular.

It’s just that there are a few more spiders than usual out on the dock just now.  Maybe it’s been too warm?  I don’t know.  But eeek!

I was okay with the necessity to evade the spider webs as I got the lights down off their hooks.

I was okay with the spider that rapelled past me as I handed the string of lights around the piling.

It’s just the rather large arachnid that was crawling across the front of my sweatshirt as I was coiling the lights that finished me off.

But…you know…let’s look on the bright side.  I’m thankful I saw it before I wore it inside.  I’m thankful it was on my shirt and not my head or my hand.  I’m thankful that the heebie-jeebies were not so debilitating that I was unable to finish the job.

But…eeek!

I’m also hoping that by the time you read this post, I will be thankful that I did not have spider nightmares all last night.  (I’m not feeling too confident about that because just writing this makes me feel like things are crawling on me, but hope is good.  It never hurts to have hope.)

What I’d like to know, though, is just what is it the lizards think they are doing?  I realize that the grasshoppers may be too large for them.  But the spiders?

The natural balance around here seems off.

The spiders need to eat the other bugs, and then the lizards need to eat the spiders.  It seems a perfectly straightforward food chain to me, but I don’t think the lizards are doing their part.