Monday, March 27, 2006

Spiders


I'm not a biologist, so I can never tell the name of a spider when I see one. Just know that they are ugly bugs that gives you a shiver.

My worst fear of spiders happened like 25 years ago, I was at home myself, and pretty frustrated to the condition of cockroaches roaming around in the house. I bought a can of cockroach spray, sprayed it all over the floor as advertised, and went to sleep.

The second day, I was happily sweeping cockroach remains starting from my bedroom door, then the lodging floor, and worked my way down the stairs approaching the ground floor where the dining room and kitchen were located. There was an average of one cockroach per step.

And I practically froze halfway down, when I saw a big, ugly spider sprawling on it's back, still moving. The body was about the size of a grape, it's furly legs spanning bigger than my palm. I took the remaining can of cockroach spray and pumped everything left on to the spider, who painfully curled up itself into a ball, still struggling. I waited for another five or ten minutes until I picked up enough courage to tuck a piece of newspaper under the spider, wraped it multiple layers, and - God forgive me - sqashed as hard as I can.

Much later in life, I read an article in newspaper that this kind of spiders fed on cockroaches, and some (rare) people actually collected them and kept them in their homes, putting one or two in their kitchens and bathrooms to get rid of roaches. Considering the population or cockroaches in my home at that time, no wonder this big fat guy had a happy life, although a terrible death.

Although I never was a great fan to the cartoon character Spider Man, I'd have to admit the two movies were both pretty entertaining. My son loved it. The kids were looking for spiders and spider webs everytime we went hiking. This picture is a small souvenir in one of these occations, definitely not one of my better spider-web-pictures, it was taken with my PDA phone with 1.3 Mega pixels CMOS camera and plastic lens, hence the lousy resolution and quality. It's just the most convenient spider related picture I can find when writing this article.

1 comment:

  1. What a great photo that do do...
    You should post in our club...
    Enjoy life if you can..

    ReplyDelete