Living arrangements and spiders and things.

The spiders have gotten much better at hiding themselves since we got here.  I don't really see them anymore but there are new cobwebs under the bathroom and laundry sinks.  Or maybe they're all small since we vacuumed up all the ones we could see when we moved in (there were just a couple in each room or so).  With one exception, most of the spiders we've seen in our apartment are daddylonglegs (probably 98%) or just a couple instances of some other little house spiders.

The exception happened last week when the cover to the kitchen fan suddenly fell off.  When climbing onto a chair to replace it I noticed a different looking spider crawling along the edge.  While we can't be totally certain, we think it was a whiteback/white-tailed spider, which are a bit venomous.  While a bite from one would certainly not be fatal, it would definitely be painful.  Needless to say that makes me nervous.  At least it doesn't seem like such a thing is very common.  Still, we keep the vacuum handy at all times just in case.. let's hope the probability of our existences crossing paths is minimal (see figure 1).

On a side note, the cover to the kitchen fan falling off was kind of funny.  It scared the bejeezus out of me as I was standing half-under it and it glanced my arm.  What are the chances it would fall off when I happened to be right there?  It's above a inconvenient space between the stove and a counter, not exactly a high traffic area in the kitchen.

Spidey-sense.

This spider is fake. Reid frightened me into thinking it was real at first.  The Huntsman spider that appeared in our cabin at the caravan park was almost this big (at least in my memory it was, so, no, it probably wasn't).  The good thing about Huntsmans is that they are big and terrifying, but not dangerous.

Our apartment is a duplex; we live on the south side of the house.  While this will be great in the summer to keep the house cool, this autumn is already a little chilly.  On warm days like today, it's warmer outside than in by 9am so I open up the windows to bring the temperature up a couple degrees.  We only get direct sunlight in through the laundry room (the sole north-facing window) and the entry hall (west-facing window).  Still, the house stays pretty cool so the only way to keep comfortable by wearing many layers.  The bathroom becomes my studio during the day because the lighting is good and it's usually the warmest in there.  Unfortunately, the window is really small.

Overall: we like our apartment.  Surprisingly, it's a little too big.  We could make do without the bedroom and have one less room to heat, which bodes well for my dreams of a tiny house future.  Or perhaps it's not exactly that it's too big, but the proportions aren't quite right.  Now that I'm using the laundry/bath as workspace, it would be nice to have some of the extra room from our living area in there.  Especially if we end up getting a washing machine, because then there really won't be any room.

Also, one note on the house design, which I fail to understand.  So you have windows and doors with screens, but then you have open vents to the outside in all the rooms?  Also, the small window in the toilet is just open: two off-set pieces of plexiglass that just barely overlap.  When I saw that I thought, seriously?  No screen or anything?  Hopefully a magpie doesn't find its way in, or anything else, for that matter.  Our cabin at the caravan park was the same way with open vents, except it didn't really matter because half the window screens were broken anyway.  We tacked muslin over the vents, hopefully this will discourage anything from coming in.  I will tell myself that it's working.

On a much more pleasant note, please see this pretty picture of a foggy rainbow.  Later on it was a double.

Postscript; next time I promise to write about something more pleasant and not spiders.  Even I just get the willies just thinking about it.  I will try to put together a photo montage of some of the other foggy morning photos we took last week.

Also, please do not google any of the spiders mentioned above... please don't.