Hello to new facebook friends!

And speaking of making new friends:

This is Rhea. She is a Garden Spider. She's been living in the shady corner where the deck meets the house, and has been there for about 10 days. 


Garden Spiders rule because every evening, they build these giant ridiculously elaborate webs, sit in the middle of the web all night, and then take the web down in the morning. Then they build a new web the next evening, and so on.


Rhea, unlike the rest of her brethren, does not build a new web every day. She creates such glorious feats of architecture that she just leaves them up. She hides during the day, and then goes out to sit in her web every night. 


And then on Wednesday afternoon, her web was destroyed. The young lad who comes to mow the lawn took a leafblower to Rhea's web. I cried. I thought Rhea - a Titan among spiders - was gone forever. 


But no. In retaliation, she built a web that is about ten times as large as the old one, and twice as awesome.


I think maybe I should have gone to college for biology or something.