Braver Than I Wanna Be

Although I don't like spiders (in any way, shape, or form) I have a bit of a morbid fascination with them, as long as I know they can't get me. When I was younger I'd spray them with hairspray (perhaps a bit mean-spirited?) or drown them in shampoo so that I wouldn't have to get close to them or try to squish them with a Kleenex. Over the years I've tried to be better and just suck it up and get them quickly, but I still shudder when I think about spiders and I avoid going after them whenever I can. Except for the time my friend Jill called me to come kill a gigantic scary one at her house so I faked being brave then too... and we ended up sucking it up with the vacuum so we didn't have to get anywhere near it. Anyway...

Today as I was working to clean out our garden I spotted a shiny black spider crawling on the garbage can. It's well known around here that I generally overreact when I see spiders, but I was pretty sure this was a black widow. My first instinct was to run away screaming with my hands in the air, but since my kids and two neighbor friends were very close by, I didn't think that was the wisest course of action. I didn't really want to try to kill it either, because it would likely drop into the grass and get away and then mate and then eat it's mate and then we'd have up to 900 black widow babies... or more likely than that it would jump at me and bite me and kill me and then go after the children... so instead I did something that went against every grain of common sense that I have and hold dear and told Olivia to run in the house and get a jar. I was SO brave (okay, I pretended to be so brave) and went right to it and captured it in the jar. It had some red marks on it's back as well as the very pronounced red hourglass shape on it's belly. I checked online and apparently juvenile black widows can have markings on their backs. Who knew?

So now we have it captured in the jar with the lid screwed on very tightly so it can't get out and it is sitting on the kitchen counter. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I am still afraid to try to kill it... and I'm still a little fascinated by it. In a twisted way I like knowing that a dangerous spider (and not just dangerous in my mind, but really dangerous) is helpless and trapped and at my mercy, instead of the other way around.
It's obvious that I'm not the photographer in the family (check out the cool new sidebar link to Ryan's photography blog) but in this photo the red hourglass is very visible. She seems to have found a comfortable resting spot mid-air. I wonder how long she'll survive without food in there. Maybe we should name her so that our kids can stop saying we won't let them have any pets.

**Are you afraid of spiders too?
**What do you think I should do with it (name suggestions welcome)?