{"id":5033,"date":"2019-09-08T16:48:17","date_gmt":"2019-09-08T23:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=5033"},"modified":"2019-09-08T16:48:19","modified_gmt":"2019-09-08T23:48:19","slug":"a-spider-in-the-mist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=5033","title":{"rendered":"A Spider in the Mist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So you know when you are walking outside and the dew is still on the \ngrass and your hands are full and you aren’t quite awake yet and you are\n bare foot so you are trying to stay on the flag stone and not really \nlooking where you are going?  And you have a sense you probably walked \ninto a spider web, cause you feel something on your left arm.  But you \nare carrying things and still needed to get where you are going so you \nignore the sensation of silk on your body.  It’s probably just a cob web\n any way, right?  I’m not much afraid of spiders, so it’s not really a \nbig deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did I mention what I was carrying was catch and release mice traps?\u00a0 No?\u00a0 Oh well let me back track a bit … my youngest daughter has the tiniest of field mouse occasionally in her room.\u00a0 Again, it’s tiny only in that I’m not much afraid of little creepy crawly furry things as I am non plussed over eight legged creatures.\u00a0 But I totally get they move real fast and you know there is the cellular memory of the medieval plague, so there is that.\u00a0 But point being my hands were full with two brightly colored green mouse houses.\u00a0 Unlike the poor moles who refused to leave my backyard despite ample warning and encouragement and who eventually met with quick and clean snap trap demise.\u00a0 Because I’m opposed to putting poison out especially when you have children and pets.\u00a0 But beyond that the slow poisons on the market today run a high risk of ending up in the food chain … hawk eats rat .. who needs that?\u00a0 If you decided you have to exterminate something be quick about it, ye?\u00a0 Quick and painless as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in this case, when relocating is a possibility, it’s always our first go-to plan.\u00a0 So the redneck and I brought two dogs, two traps and our cell phones of course because you never know when there is a photo-op.\u00a0 Right before we open the exterior door from the pool side entrance I turn to take a quick glance at my left bicep and don’t you know there’s a moving creature dangling from a string!\u00a0 As the redneck puts it … “Babe, you should have seen your eyes!!!”\u00a0 And I don’t doubt him at all, though admittedly he’s a bit more concerned<\/em> about spiders than I am.\u00a0 But it’s true, when you see something moving and crawling up quickly to get to you<\/em> there’s a brief moment of OH MY GOD.\u00a0
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“Can you help me out here?” I said in a quick but not overly \nhysterical shrill.  But by then the little lady had climbed up onto my \narm and was settling herself and her package.  Because you see, the \nreason she was so intent on staying by my side was that she had just \ngrabbed herself her next meal and by golly she was not about to let go \nof it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few flicks of a cell phone and we successfully coached the spider \nand her snack to the flagstone where we were standing.  I have to \nbelieve if you were an arachnophobic you wouldn’t be this far down the \nnot-so-shaggy-dog-story, but I should mention it gets more graphic from \nhere and there really isn’t any dharma worth disrupting your bliss so \nthanks for stopping by, you should move to the next click therapy \ndistraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I knelt down beside the bug and her bundle I saw that the meal \nwas still alive.  Very much alive.  It’s a sad thing, no matter how you \nslice it.  I mean, I grew up watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom  <\/a>and\n bad things happened on there, they did, but rarely did you sit and \nwatch the slow death of whatever was good eats at the time.  But this \nspider was so dedicated to her prey that I became if not equally \nfascinated, sufficiently invested to watch.  Several minutes went by.  \nThe redneck took umbrage to my insinuation that I found it hard to \nbelieve he ever had the patience<\/em> to watch a spider for a good \nlong time.  And he reminded me, with his voice rising ever so slightly \n(at least a notation fifth if not an octave) that he use to set by a crickbank<\/em> for hours waiting for a bite and watched plenty of spiders in his day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I watched for several minutes.\u00a0 It’s a morbid fascination, I admit.\u00a0 I could hear a clicking sound, or a buzzing sound.\u00a0 But wings couldn’t be moving inside that tight mummified wrap.\u00a0 On closer exam, I could see that the sound was coming from the mandibles of the creature in the death trap.\u00a0 Seriously this was a sad thing.\u00a0 But for the spider this was just what she had to do.\u00a0 This was her version of door dash or cutthroat kitchen perhaps.\u00a0 Okay, for your first sabotage you are going to get plucked out of your web and carried a great distance and thrown on the ground, how do you still prepare your meal .. GO you have 30 minutes!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In truth, it probably DID take her thirty minutes to devour her dinner.\u00a0 I eventually had to get back on track and set up the neon green mouse traps.\u00a0 So I picked up an old paper plate that was near the BBQ grill, and I scooped her and her moving meal up and carried her away to a safe place out of the traffic path.\u00a0 I went by several more times during the course of the morning.\u00a0 And she seemed quite happy with her new location and was still busy doing whatever it was that she was doing.\u00a0
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The last time I saw her .. there was a dead black spider on the plate\n .. to say it probably had the life sucked out of it would have been \nmost accurate.  I looked underneath the edge of the paper and saw the \nlittle tan spider tucked all up and satisfied.  At this point I realized\n she’d be happy to set up shop again right where I had put her.  But in \ntruth, I thought it might be better to take her a bit further<\/em> \ninto the nature parts of our yard.  Which I did.  Apparently eating your\n mate is not uncommon among any\/all of the spider varieties.  (Spider Cannibalism<\/a>)  There’s a lot of theory<\/a> about its ROI, Darwinian notions or Kinsey-esque kink explanations<\/a>, but very little consensus other than perhaps that males tend to be smaller<\/em><\/a> and food-like.
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Were you wondering about the mouse in the little green house?\u00a0 Well that thread of the web had a much happier ending all around .. or at least for now perhaps because we only ever know what the world looks like for this slice of the pie.\u00a0 But the little (barely 2 inches) field mouse found the tiny cracker with organic peanut butter and seemed hardly phased that he was trapped inside.\u00a0 After a brief family discussion we decided to release him in the wayback of our grounds.\u00a0 Hoping that he’d find a more suitable location to dine.\u00a0 And we ordered a new weather door strip on Amazon Prime.
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It was late at night when we released the little fella.\u00a0 You know how it is when the grass feels damp in the darkness and you don’t have any shoes on, and you are carrying a little dog, and a hot pack and your cell phone with a light in front of you trying not to trip or step on Russian thistle.\u00a0 And hoping … as you duck under a branch that you don’t walk into another spider on a date from Tinder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So you know when you are walking outside and the dew is still on the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dharma","category-talking-paws"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-5.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5033"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5038,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5033\/revisions\/5038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}