Ahhh Spider!

You know you are loved when your husband brings home a gigantic hand carved wooden spider as a gift. Well maybe in your house that would be grounds for divorce, but in mine in a reason to do a little happy dance every time I see it. Nobody but us would consider this to be a beautiful, thoughtful appropriate gift. I love being us.

This dude in the market has been selling these amazing, hand carved, two toned, wooden spiders for weeks. We have longingly admired them, but they were ENORMOUS and cost £35. Now, £35 is a very  good deal for an amazing, hand carved, two toned wooden spider, but it is just a wee bit out of our price range as we have some expenses coming up (like our best friend’s wedding in Wales) so we had to restrain ourselves and be good. Besides the other ones were freakin’ HUGE and we had no place to put them.

However, Saturday the dude had a smaller one (that is still on the gigantic side) for only £20 and when I got home from the public library there it was waiting for me, in all its glory.

It is about as big as a record album—for those who remember vinyl. And this was the smaller one!  

                                                                Top view:

Front view:

Side view:

Is that not *gorgeous*???? Look at that beautiful wood. Check out those sexy jointed legs, those flirty curled up palps, that raised abdomen ready to shoot strands of silky web and those sharp fangs. It should be noted that while the size might make you think it was meant to be a tarantula, it is in fact a spider. You can tell this because spider fangs are like pincers--they open outwards and come together in the middle, while tarantula fangs move up and down and stab their prey in a downwards motion. These fangs are pincer shaped. We know this because we are geeks. Think of it this way—all tarantulas are spiders, but not all spiders are tarantulas.  It has the eyes carved on top in a cluster as spider eyes often are (although there appears to be 10 not 6-8, and they are square shaped but I won’t quibble.) I like how the pattern of the dark wood provide some camouflage effects--much as real spiders have to survive in the wild. I particularly like the way there are “false eyes” in the front with the pattern of dark and light wood with the true eyes being on top.

We have it positioned in front of the Big Lizard (we don’t have a telly but we do have a large monitor hooked up to a DVD player. Monitor. Big Lizard. Geddit?) In the photo you can see she is guarding the remote from attackers. I imagine when we have some folks over for dinner and a film (namely the ones whose wedding we will be attending shortly in Wales) we’ll have to move it, but no matter.

 All the Spiderbabes love it. All the beanie baby spiders from National Geographic are in awe. We tell the girls if they eat up all their crickets they can grow up big and strong like their new wooden sister. They sigh and climb their tanks to get a better look. But being spiders that can’t see for toffee so they just make a little webbing and climb back down, secure in the knowledge that they are loved. And we do love you all--especially your new wooden sister.