111

Going out to the garage this evening, this is what greeted me as I stepped across the threshold. I squealed as any woman would do. Jason came running, thinking it was a rodent in the garage. The spider scurried over to a shadow under the bicycle tire and Jason grabbed the can of Hot Shot to take the offender out. This titan of a spider would not die no matter how much kill juice we sprayed on it. He kept crawling toward us and into other spots where we ushered him back out and waited patiently for him to take his last, creepy steps. At last, he folded in all of his legs and stopped.

We immediately set out to take a picture and Jason coaxed his legs out straight again with some screws before rigor set in. I randomly had a quarter in my pocket, so we threw it down for size reference. Then Jason decided that we needed a tape measure too. You can see, the spider's legs spanned 2 inches in his relaxed position. He was much larger as he was casually walking toward me; owning the garage.

Not satisfied with a faraway view, Jason scraped him up on a putty knife and got the flashlight out for closer inspection. Thank goodness for the macro feature on the camera, which allowed us to get the following shot, which proves that the term, 'big, hairy spider' rings true in this case.