Summer of the Spiders

I am really tired as I write this, but I wanted to write it tonight, so bear with me.

There is SOMETHING going on with our ecosystem right now.

I thought at first that the massive amounts of spiders only affected my apartment building. Webs of what look to be Halloween spider webbing on the ivy covering the front of my building. A back porch area that is infested with webs and arachnids hanging in the middle. Spiders living in my plants. Driving on my hog and having to pull over because there is a spider hanging out on my rearview mirror. More than once. The web that takes up a quarter of my living room window (on the outside, thankfully)

But it's not just here. They're everywhere.

Jason and I went to Hollywood video tonight and, draped from ceiling to hanging tv to walls were webs with spiders in the middle. In Hollywood video.

Someone at rehearsal told me about a park in Texas where there were sheets of webs, and the amount of mosquitoes caught made an audible hum/whine as you walked by. Mosquitoes are also blooming in numbers. Jason and I were bombarded at the coffee shop we were at until the video store trip. All. Over. The. Place.

So obviously, there is a surge in the mosquito population which would explain the explosion in spiders. But why? I know we've had quite a bit of rain the last month or so. But save a few large storms, we have had a relatively dry summer from what I remember. And the spiders were all over the place before the hurricane that started our wet season. As we speak, Kitten is batting at some flying creature. I think it's a mosquito. Which wouldn't surprise me. I've had to kill three in my bedroom so far.

This is just very interesting. I wonder if there is an increase in birds, since there is more bird food dangling from webs just waiting for me to walk through. And have the heebie jeebies for the rest of my day. The thing is, I haven't noticed more birds at all.

I just wonder what this means. What it means as a statement to our environment, to the number of different species and how they interact with each other.

There has only been one other time in my life that I had to seriously thank my stars and garters that I wasn't arachnophobic. And that was the shithole apartment I lived in in Muncie that was so infested that at one point it looked like my carpet was moving. And the wolf spider ran across my ankle, waking me up in the middle of the night.

Maybe I just wanted to document this, in case no one hears from me for a bit and finally someone breaks down the door to discover me completely coccooned on my couch with 'Scrubs' playing on repeat and Kitten nibbling my toes off.

Not that that would happen, of course. Kitten would never stoop to eating my toes. She would start with my eyes.....