Sunday morning surprise!

Over the weekend I tend to wander around in my pyjamas, contact lenses not yet inserted, until after breakfast, before attempting to dress and get decent.

On Sunday morning I was up just after 9, and headed into the kitchen to make breakfast. Everything slightly blurry with the contact lenses out, but fortunately I'm not completely blind!

Stuck the coffee on, cut a few slices of bread and opened up the cupboard to get the spreads out - and there, on the inside of the cupboard, right at eye-level, was a gigantic rain spider!!!!

I'm SO not one for anything that has more than 4 legs! And spiders are the absolute worst! Called in the cavalry (my son), who refused to come anywhere near it, so it was up to me to either get it out of there, or starve for the day! I couldn't leave it - there's nothing worse than a spider who disappears into parts unknown....

Thankfully, without my lenses in, he didn't look too bad (works well for cleaning up any dog-hurl too, by the way), so I found a 5 litre ice-cream container and piece of cardboard, approached him from the side, covered him up, slipped in the cardboard, and then chucked the entire ensemble over the fence.

Goodbye spider! I hope he enjoys the great outdoors sufficiently that he won't be back...

We've had a few of these guys turn up at our place over the years. The last one appeared suddenly on the ceiling above me - I had been watching TV for a while, and happened to look up. I don't know how long he'd been there, but you can be sure I wasn't sitting under him for more than a split-second after that! :) We managed to fling him outside on the end of a long broom, but not before he'd done the scurry-toward-us thing, which totally freaked us out.

The last one we tried to do with a broom we unfortunately squashed by mistake. Poor beast.

Man, I hate spiders.