Just after midnight, Andrew went to bed. I stayed at my computer, listening to The Beatles (Revolver, my favourite Beatles album) with the headset. By the time Taxman was over and Eleanor Rigby had commenced, Andrew came out wanting my attention. I took off the headset and said, "What?" He said, "Come here," in that tone of voice that I know means "you have to see this for yourself", so I went.

In our bedroom were a couple dozen small spiders. All over the ceiling, a few on the walls. I don't know how many there were because we didn't bother counting. It was quite amazing, though! A room full of little spiders! We did have the window open, but we figure these must have been hatchlings, from a clutch of spider eggs somewhere in the room. Given the placement of the spiders and the probabilities of where some spider would have been able to lay her eggs, we figure it was the ceiling air vent (the one for the air conditioning, which we never use because it doesn't work particularly well and it's quite expensive to run).

So Andrew said to me, "What are we going to do?" Now, I know that most people would have just grabbed a can of bug spray or something to swat them all to death, but we're not like that. When we can, we catch spiders and we put them outside. It's not always possible, of course, but we make the effort. We'll do it with other insects, as well, when it's feasible to do so.

The only thing I could think of was to get some containers and catch the spiders and put them out. Which we did. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to coax them into a jar, and Andrew found he could get six or so spiders in the jar at once. We had two jars; I periodically took one of the jars outside to turn the spiders loose. Just in case you ever wondered about it, it's surprisingly difficult to get baby spiders out of a jar. They can be very tenacious little creatures and persuading them to go can be challenging.

We did end up having to chase some of the spiders with a small broom, because to catch them Andrew had to stand on the bed (so we chased them toward the bed). One did fall onto the bed (eek!) but we found it and caught it. We got the one that was on the ceiling inside the closet. A few were caught on the broom, itself (they run into the bristles, then slowly come out and we put them in the jar), one was caught on a shirt. Only one died, and that was certainly accidental, but overall, given the situation, I think we did pretty well.

There are probably a couple more hiding in the edges of the room (the walls are panelled), but we'll keep an eye out for them and with any luck we'll be able to catch them, as well.

I'm hoping this will bring me some good karma, but even if it doesn't, it kind of feels good to know I've saved the lives of a number of spiders. And it's kind of cool to think of my bedroom as the site of such an eruption of abundance and life. It's got to be some sort of blessing, right?