I'm racking up the Cool Mom points

I neglected to mention that in the midst of my shoe crisis yesterday I found the time to capture a tarantula at work in a To Go salad container. Do I rock, or what?

Oh, the tarantula was for Ben. It's not like I was just hanging out with giant spiders for the fun of it.

We have lots of wildlife at work. Some of it is even outside the buildings. There are lots of deer, wild turkeys, bobcats, mountain lions (occasionally), squirrels by the thousands, moles, and great blue cranes that eat the moles and squirrels. (So wish I had a picture of that because it is really something to see.)

And, we have tarantulas. Tarantulas that pop really loudly if you chance to run them over with your car. In fact, the first time such a thing happened to me I thought I'd blown a tire. If you don't know much about our large arachnid friends let me tell you all of what I know. That should take about 3 sentences.

The females live in holes in the ground and live so long that spider geeks joke about making provisions in their wills for tarantula guardianship. Male tarantulas are not so fortunate in the longevity department. As with so many species, they are seemingly only around for one thing - the servicing of the women folk. Toward that end, October finds all boy-type tarantulas hitting the road in search of a sexy girl-type spiders.

Fang, as our wayward Tarantula was christened, had the misfortune to be searching for some strange on the outside wall of our office building. He's probably not the brightest in his class, I'm guessing. Bright or not, I thought Ben's class would enjoy speculating him for a day or two. So I scooped him up in the salad dish, ran home (to change my shoes) and put him in the old mouse house and dropped him off with Ben's teacher.

I think I'm the favorite Mom now.

But today we returned Fang to the wild. I'm sure he's bellied up to a Spider Bar telling Tarantula Horror Stories about his alien abduction right about now.

You can go shower now. Or whatever it is you do to get rid of the heebie-geebies.