Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I was sitting in the living room when Jo said, “Look Mommy, another spider.”

Crap.

I turn around and the mighty hunter cats have what appears to be a huge brown recluse cornered by the kitchen. Max kept playing with it and I trusted him to keep it busy while I went on a mad dash for an Agent of Spider Death. We didn’t have any bug spray, so I spritzed it good with some stainless steel cleaner. If I’d smashed it, identification would have been hard to do, so it was a last resort.

I put it in a jar and got a flashlight to look closely at it. It was all drawn up for a while so I couldn’t see the eyes. Eventually it relaxed (died?) and I could see. Instead of a real fiddle and the eye pattern of the brown recluse which is three pairs of two eyes in a crescent shaped pattern, this guy just had one cluster of eyes right in the middle. That makes it a Southern House Spider, non-poisonous and fairly common.

Still doesn’t change the fact there was an honest-to-goshen brown recluse in the bathtub with my girls the other night. But thinking that I had mutant huge recluses who just waltz around my living room had me pretty fricking depressed.

Posted Critters, Kids |