There’s times when I feel like I’m not getting the true Australian experience. I focus a lot on my work, and travel so much for my job that I tend to see mainly offices and hotel rooms – not the real Australia. Then there’s times like Saturday morning that remind me of where I really am…

I woke up early and sat down in front of my PC to check my e-mail. As I picked up my headphones I noticed there was a single strand of spider web attached to them. Now, while normally this wouldn’t be that alarming – my mind began to race. This strand of web was unlike any I had seen before. It was thick and sticky. So thick in fact that you could see how its gooey-ness attached itself to my PC case. “OMG… Where did this come from??”, I thought. Panic ensued. I checked all around my PC, behind the filing cabinet, under the desk, under the chair… nothing. Great – well – I figured he’d turn up eventually if he was still around.

Indeed he did. When I went to wake up Makiko, as her eyes just opened for the day she said “What’s that?!?” as she stared up at the corner of our room near the ceiling. Lo and behold – there he was…

If you don’t think that shot’s impressive (and you’re brave) – read on for a closeup and all the gory details…

Now that is the ugliest spider I’ve ever seen outside of a pet store or zoo for that matter.

If I wasn’t a bit panicked already – I definitely was now. “What the hell do we do now? Is it poisonous? How do we get it out of here? Ahhh!!!!” … Oh what wimpy immigrants we are.

I wanted to just throw something at it – ambitiously thinking I would make a deadly blow. Makiko didn’t buy it. She wanted to catch it in a bag. I didn’t buy it. We eventually decided to move all the stuff off her dresser and jab it with this bubble wrapped curtain rod we had sitting around. It took me a few minutes to gather up enough courage, but eventually I executed on our plan…

I jabbed him up against the corner – a couple of legs fell off, and he fell off the wall onto the dresser – good thing we moved that stuff! He was still limping around a bit, so I smacked him with the rod. Still moving – WTF! So I smacked him again. Dead. Hooray! I then ran around the apartment screaming like a little school girl. I didn’t care – man that was scary.

So now we had dead spider guts and legs lying on our bedroom carpet and furniture. Great! I ended up picking it all up with some plastic bags (using them as gloves). You wouldn’t believe how hard the legs felt through the bags. They were like little sticks – real solid.

In the aftermath – I did some research. Even though the bugger looked pretty scary – he wasn’t one of those spiders you really have to be afraid of. It was a brown Huntsman spider. A relatively harmless spider that actually eats all the bad poisonous spiders.

Huh – cool. Maybe we should’ve kept Ol’ Hairy Legs around after all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under Sydney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.