Das Tagebuch Murnaus

Yow. I wasn't the first one to mentally append the adjective "mantis-like" to Victoria Beckham, but this makes it obvious.
Thanks to thistlelurid for the original photo of Posh, oh no wait the other one...

A few weeks ago my sister gave me an old World War One era wooden barracks box. My winter project will be to sand it down, fix it up and refinish it, as it's quite a sturdy little thing.

It had spent many seasons in the back of a barn and was pretty dirty, so on the weekend I was cleaning it of dust and webs when what should start walking around in it but a Black Widow spider! I got a pill bottle and coaxed it in there, and the next day took it to work where I took some pictures:



(resized and cropped, the original one has fine detail but is 1.4 MB)

It does not have the blazing-red hourglass mark, but I am informed by at least one semi-entomologist that they don't always have such. Often it's just an indeterminate orange spot, which this one did have. What led me to ID it was the bulbous glossy black abdomen, hairless legs, the way it began to spin cobwebs in the bottle, and the fact that I had killed one exactly like it, with the hourglass mark, in Angie's trailer in Nevada at Burning Man this year! (We figured that one had crawled out of a pile of wood some people from the Midwest had dumped in their camp next to her trailer, and that it had crawled up the drain of her sink looking for water.)