Pinewoods 7: Spider

[jere7my]

(Mood = tired now because I am PACKING for the upcoming MOVE on August 11th, not because I am any longer SICK as a DOG. The apartment is a mess, and I've been busy; this partially explains the infrequent updates. Also, I have been AIMing an awful lot, primarily with Miriam but also with showergrrl, carpenter, and flammifera, and I've gotten a little addicted to the amusing and simple online RPG Kingdom of Loathing. More entries will come, but here's a wee one....)

Nature story:

During lunch at Pinewoods one day, a small spider dropped from the rafters in the dining hall, directly above Andy P.'s head. It was supported by two threads of silk, a short vertical one and a long hypotenuse leading to another rafter. As I watched, it launched a little spitball of silk on a tether, which, remarkably, flew ten or fifteen feet across the dining hall before losing its momentum. It was aimed directly away from me, so I could see the shimmering undulations in exaggerated, foreshortened perspective. I assume the little lady was aiming for another rafter, but she missed, so the long thread of silk just bannered in the slight breeze while she rewound it.

I also saw a Fowler's toad on the steps outside the pay phone cubbies, a myriad of fluttering dobsonflies in C# (including one male, with the long mandibles), foot-long bluegills through my goggles in Long Pond, and aptly-named pincher beetles. (Ow.) There was a small bird nesting above the stage door on C#. During sound checks it swooped in and out over our heads, and peered curiously at us from the safety of its twiggy nest.

Comments

Moving

[megan-powell.livejournal.com]

Moving sucks. You have my sympathy.

[irilyth]

Huh: Amy and I saw some big long spider webs at the Huntington Gardens last week, and wondered how the webs ended up stretched between these tree branches that were separated by twenty or thirty feet... Can spiders really shoot webs at that distance? I thought it was just the radioactive ones, and/or the people they bit. :^)