Your icon = my face. GAH

Dude. SQUISH IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT WILL COME BACK AND KILL YOU A MILLION TIMES.


SQUISH IT!

Squished.

Welcome to North Carolina!

Pretty, aren't they?

We used to get those in California all the time. I'm all for spiders outside except the black widows. Those things seriously creep the hell out of me.

You can always tell their webs because they are a big disorganized mess.

Ack black widows are super scary!

Racist!

Take off, and nuke the site from orbit...

It's the only way to be sure.

Fuckin' A.

Holy fuck.

Someone was just telling me about someone local who recently died of a brown recluse bite. Gah.

Um. Oh. My. Gawd. You know MY feelings on spiders... mental note to self - NEVER go visit Josh! ;)

oh my god I'm going to have nightmares from that. What is it?

It's a spider.

It looks like the size of a baseball. I have never seen one like that before.

Actually, it's the size of a basketball.

If you have large hands, you can palm it and take it outside.

One of these.

Note, especially, the super scary part about the venom.

I'd move. Immediately.

Yeah, reading it a couple of Rev. Wright's sermons should kill any living brain cells it may have.

Black widows freak me out. I had never seen one up close and personal before I moved into my house. Supposedly, black widows aren't in my part of Oregon. So imagine my surprise to see one the size of a quarter meandering across the living room. I didn't want to step on it because EW it would leave a huge mark, and it might bite me. I couldn't vacuum it because I have a recurring nightmare about things I vacuum crawling out and eating me. I couldn't flush it for similar reasons. So I caught it in a jar and showed it to everyone who came to my house. I kept the jar in the fridge. I figured if the spider somehow figured out how to open the lid on the jar, it would have a harder time opening the door. It stayed in the fridge for 3 months before it finally died.

They are so sinister looking. I think I'd be afraid of them because of how scary they look, even if I didn't know anything about their necrotic poisons.

A) I love spiders.
B) I'm recently reading a lot of Buddhist literature about how all living things have inner Buddhas and deserve the same amount of respect.
C) Kill it another time for me! EEK!

about how big is that? It's hard to get a perspective, as I've never seen one in person before.

I believe it is 100% to scale!

The body was about the size of a blueberry (a store-bought one, not a wild one).

Which, to put it another way, is ENTIRELY TOO FRIGGING LARGE.

Yeek. I lived in a house in Florida for a while that was being reclaimed by nature. The wolf spiders were bad enough, but we also found a black widow living between the screen and the glass of the bathroom window. We didn't really trouble it, but - worryingly - it disappeared from the window a few days later...

I hear that, mostly, when you see one and then it disappears, it's set up house inside your inner ear. :)

Black Widows are beautiful spiders... freaking poisonous though so um... hope you killed it. Raid won't help. Just whack it with a 2x4 or a broom.

The good news is, it's probably eating other insects.

The good news is, it's probably eating other insects.

Yes, but first it's using it's crazy-poisonous venom to kill the fuck out of them.

Whoa Jesus Christ Almighty! Thanks for the nightmares.

/shudder

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIEEEEEE!

I think this plus ursulav's Adventures with Ticks have put me over my quarterly quota for bug tales. *twitch*

Wow... you know, I read this a few days ago, but the pict didn't load for me until now. I didn't realize that it was ALSO a Black Widow.

Perhaps we are having a rising? One of the seven signs? Oh dear.