Spider Trouble

the front one

The Big One

the small one

The other day we were sitting out on the lawn and I happened to look at the bottom of the deck just in time to see an enormous spider crawling up underneath. Karl looked everywhere for it, but didn't see it. He thought I was exagerrating. A couple of days later I walked out to turn on the sprinkler and there were two spiders building webs around the electrical meter. The "small one" was about the size of a quarter, The big one was about the size of a golf ball. He hid, so the picture doesn't do him justice. Needless to say, I made Karl kill them. Then Amalie pointed a spider out to me on the front of the house. Karl got a great video of it wrapping it's last meal. As you can tell, we didn't know Karl was taping. Where are these huge spiders coming from?

The other day we had a huge wind storm and a fire somewhere in the valley. Here's a picture of our garden after the wind came through (remember how tall our peas used to be?) and a picture of the red sun (of course it doesn't do it justice, but I wanted to share it with you.

Great weight loss race update: Welcome David to the contest. I'm doing ok. I'm really having a problem with those treats and I've only worked out once (I counted playing ghosts in the graveyard with the kids working out - I was running). I gained two pounds and lost 2.7 pounds, so technically I'm down .7 pounds, for today anyway. I hope the rest of you are doing better than I am.