life in alaska

Today, home with sick child, I decided to mop. It's been a while. My bucket was somewhere in the garage. I looked hard, found it filled with empty flowerpots. So, I reached in to empty it out and saw a spider - not tiny, not so huge - and paused a second. Then decided the spider wasn't that big of a deal and reached back in, only to see the sun glint off a little red hourglass. It's always fun to find a Black Widow in your garage storage-room-slash-husband's-sometime-office. I pretty much hauled it out, tipped it over and whacked the fire and brimstone out of that spider. My second Black Widow this summer. Ugh. Days like this cause me to fondly remember wandering barefoot in the woods in Maine, nothing poisonous nearby except maybe mushrooms, which don't attack.