It is now Spider Season at our house, which means we have spiders all over the place. As usual, they are huge and scary, but we found what I erroneously called a yellow banana spider that we hadn’t seen before. It was actually a “garden spider“. Mason and I caught a green grasshopper and thought we would feed the spider. We don’t like the green grasshoppers because they bite. It doesn’t hurt but it is just gross and they are pests. We do like the spiders because they keep the bad bugs like mosquitoes down.

So, we fed the grasshopper to the spider and this was the result. The spider quickly won the match, and we checked on him frequently over the next few days until he disappeared for the season. These spiders are pretty neat, and make some of the coolest webs in all of spiderdom.

Today I had taken the day off because Heidi and the kids had just come home from Idaho, and me, Heidi and Whitney were watching a movie in the living room and Mason was watching one on the computer in the kitchen. All of a sudden, the house started shaking and it just got worse and worse. The kids jumped up and Mason ran into the living room. They were wondering what was going on and Heidi and I said it felt like an earthquake. It just got stronger and stronger, so we went outside until it calmed down.

Our neighbor opened her window and said it felt like her house was falling down. When we got back in we saw on the Internet that there had been a strong earthquake in Virginia, and we did have some things knocked off the walls and shelves. (I also included a picture of Mason’s room, which he wanted me to take. It looks like there was a natural disaster in there too, but it is normal.)