I'm in a funk right now, for no apparent reason, so here's the spider that was right outside our back door in Alabama. I thought she was rather charming. I talked to her every day and she didn't seem to mind. She was particularly grateful that I chose to use a different door and didn't disturb her web.
I think we parted as friends.
My energy levels are too low to look her up and I'm hoping Tim will identify her reflexively.
Question: What do you do when you don't feel like doing nothing? I get these spells from time to time and I just lay around until they pass. Fortunately, it isn't affecting my work, so I'm putting serious energy into that, but the rest of life, from cooking to writing to reading to agriculture is just so much meh right now. I even bailed out of the gym early the last two days and for the last ten months, I've hit the weights as hard as I have ever hit them before.
Morning coffee and prayer will do the trick tomorrow and I'll push myself at the gym afterwards. I'm just sure of it. I think.
We’ve all had days like that. I find that doing something that breaks the usual routine often picks me up. I’d suggest playing hooky for a day and take a trip to the San Diego County Fair. If that kind of Americana doesn’t perk you up, well then I’m out of ideas.
ReplyDeleteOooh. There's a good idea! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteNice spider! She appears to be a Golden Silk Spider, Trichonephila clavipes
ReplyDeletehttps://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc/golden_silk_spider.htm
I've heard about these, they are apparently the largest non-tarantula spiders in North America. And they are a sexually dimorphic species, with females much bigger than the males, so this is pretty certainly a "she". They are also exclusively tropical/semitropical, so the only way to see them is to do what you did, and go someplace warm like the deep south.
I'm glad to hear that the two of you got along well together.
Holy cow, the San Diego County Fair lasts for a whole month? Their website says it runs June 8 to July 4. I've never seen a county fair in Michigan that lasted more than a week, and the Houghton County Fair only lasts 3 days. Even the Michigan State Fair looks like it only lasts 5 days.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you can run a fair for a month when you have a population base of over 3 million people, though.
Tim,
ReplyDeleteYeah, it runs a month. The last full one in 2019 pulled in a typical crowd of over 1.5 million. The one in 2020 got CoViD-ed and in 2021 they had a smaller one mostly because their main parking lot was still taken up as a drive through vaccination location (they never announced the attendance). They were the first county fair in California to try to reopen (after all the stuff the Goober had done here in CA I thought they’d get cancelled by him, but it happened - and Mrs Ohioan and I went). It is a classic midwestern county fair just bigger and longer (and we’ve been to the Ingram County fair in MI, for example). So classic that there are showings for all sorts of livestock. Yes, there is a lot more raising of livestock in the county than I ever would have thought possible before I got here.