Car pet

I don't have a current photo of a spider on my nerdstick.

Ah well. Have a rose, instead.

A spider would have been more to the point, really, but at least this way the blog's been saved from turning into a pumpkin once again.

Anyone wondering what's up with the spider thing yet? Probably not my two fans, who already know about my arachnophilia. They won't know this particular reference, though, because it's recent.

My car has a pet, you see.

A pet spider.

I don't know its name, since it's the car's pet and not mine, but the car does in fact have a pet spider. She's kind of petite and cute, actually.

She, Dee? Yes, she. And I'm kind of getting tired of both asking and answering my own questions, thank you very much. Most spiders are pretty easy to sex. Just look at the pedipalps (those little leg-looking things right beside the jaws). Long thin pedipalps generally mean a female, while clubbed pedipalps indicate a male. Females often have larger, rounder abdomens as well, but it's way easier to tell by the pedipalps. And now you know.

Anyway.

I first noticed the car's pet spider a week or so, I guess. There was a beautiful little web on the driver's side mirror when I went to work. Obviously the drive to work pretty much did in the web, and I thought possibly the spider also.

No sir.

The web was in a slightly different place when I went back out to the car that afternoon. And, sadly, destroyed again by the time we got home.

She's since been making a progress around the whole car, probably trying to find a place where natural disasters don't seem to happen twice a day. Currently she's trying out the rear passenger door-handle well. Twice daily destruction there, too, but this time she's being a little more stubborn about her positioning. Incidentally, can you imagine what that twice-daily commute must be like to a tiny creature whose whole life depends on feeling the vibrations in a web? If she had enough brain to think (which I doubt very much that she has), she might be wondering what god was trying so violently to take its vengeance on her.

One day I'd got in the car and driven off, oddly enough not thinking of the spider passenger. I was a fair way down the road before I noticed that the poor silly thing had been on the windshield when I drove off. If you've ever wondered how a spider deals with suddenly being in a wind tunnel with no shelter (and who hasn't?), I now know that the procedure is legs in, anchor down, and hope for the best.

It must have worked, because my car still has a pet spider.

I wonder what its name is? Other than Orb Weaver, that is.



The car's name, for anyone who might have missed my very exciting post about the futility of car naming a few month's back, is Huff. I'll leave you to think about that one.