We have a family of spiders living in some ambiguous part of the car. Sometimes they crawl out from behind a visor or across the dashboard. Then we freak out and wave our hands in the air, while yelling “Ahhhh! Ahhh Ahhh!” This does make driving more difficult. Finally, the non-driver scrounges up a piece of paper or an atlas page from a less popular state (like Alabama or Arkansas) and squooshes the brute. This is no small undertaking because these are big fleshy gangly white spiders. They bear a passing resemblance to Dr. Phil.

Today I was wondering how cold it has to get before they die of exposure. I said “I’m going to ask a spiderologist.” Mr. H said “I’M BRIAN FELLOWS.”

So I turned to my old friend the internet. It seems that the organs of spiders just swim around in hemolymph, which is their sorry excuse for blood. They survive during the winter by burrowing for warmth and lowering their metabolic rate. That’s what I’m doing right now. Except my strategy involves a bottle of wine and a plate of pasta and a duvet rather than leaf mold.

We had one more parasitic encounter before we even made it into the house. The downstairs neighbors waylaid us and asked us to look at their computah because they took it to Best Buy after they got it from their brotha, and they put the bits and the bytes in it, but they can’t get on the internet because Comcast says they don’t have enough bits, but they left them a CD, and then they had to call Microsoft, and that cost thuhty dollahs, can you believe it, but they still aren’t on the internet, not the high speed one, and they need a Windows 98 disc because they can’t download the explorer, and their friend Sheryl had a look, and she is so good with computahs, but she couldn’t figure it out eitha, and could we just take a look?

Of course someone at work already basically asked me that same question today, so I was able to answer in no uncertain terms “Find where it says ‘Attachment’ in the menu bar of your email program, then choose ‘Save.'”

Here’s some pictures of spider bites. There are more vile pictures in the lower left nav if you are so inclined.

-xxoo