Remember when i said that Home Theaters were better than Swimming Pools? Well, I discovered another reason why my theater (and probably your theater too, that is unless you have some serious hoarder, cleanliness issues; you don't have stacks of old newspapers and rotting food and boxes of cat litter spread around your living room, do you? Because that is going to *seriously* affect our friendship. Even electronically. In fact, go and tighten that up before you continue reading...) is better than a pool.

Basically it involves spider venom and the chances of it getting it injected  into my head unexpectedly and violently. And I'm thinking that the only super-power side effect would be skin that slowly rots and withers off and probably an amuse bouche of some giant, blinding, searing pain.

Over the past couple of days, my pool has been fighting a sickness that has been manifesting itself in the form of algae. I have been upping the chlorine dosage, brushing down the sides, vacuuming, etc. So, when I get home tonight, the pool is looking kind of cloudy and hazy so I head back to the filter to check the chlorinator and dump in the last of my chlorine stabilizer (a chemical that, to be honest, I really have no idea what it does. But stabilizing sounds good and it was a jug that I inherited from the previous owner, and I've tried other things that don't seem to be working so another chemical download probably won't hurt). As I'm walking over to my pump, my head whacks into something that feels like my head has caught the third arresting wire on the USS Truman. I look up and see that I am surrounded by this thick, ropey crazy, Jackson Pollock style spiderweb. And then I catch site of this monster mere inches from my head:

Not cool! However, kind of cool was the tons of wrapped up corspes that were littering the web like little scavenger hunt prizes. Each corspe was another bug that wasn't out biting me. And that was distracting the spider -- or milking his poison sack -- from biting me. On a side note, have you ever tried to take a picture of a spider? It was damn near impossible. This was a *giant* spider (easily as big as my palm) but I could NOT seem to get it to show up in the camera's display. It was like trying to take a picture of Dracula in a mirror. You could see him but you couldn't SEE him. I'd be looking RIGHT AT the spider, but the camera would see right through him. This was the only of 10 shots that turned out. I'm guessing that spider photography is one of the top reasons why someone selects an SLR over a compact digital.