Oh my ... spider!!!

But first, here is a little closer look at the bear in Gatlinburg (note - telephoto lens :).


S/he was cute - tried to climb a tree, but the branch wouldn't hold its weight so it toppled to the ground. Poor little fella was probably just wandering aimlessly after his momma booted him out. The park ranger was explaining that they get pushed away from territory that is familiar to and have to fend for themselves - only to get picked on by other bear that have already established territory in the new area.


The sunrise yesterday morning - thank you, Lord, it was beautiful!


View across the valley - love the low little clouds.


My hubby had the great idea of having our coffee on the tower - nice! Looking forward to doing that more often. John is finishing up the design for the remaining stairs up to the tower and they will get started building them next week.

AND - finally ... SPIDER!!! YUCK!!! The kids were helping to clean up the basement yesterday and hollered up the tower that they had found a "ginormous spider". Since most of our spiders are "ginormous", for them to be calling attention to it, I knew this one needed to be seen. John and I were working at the topmost of the tower so I came down all 5 sections of stairs to see the spider. I immediately yelled to John that he needed to come and look, too!

This first picture is really blurry (hmmm ... maybe someone was shaking?), but it struck me funny having seen the picture of the 19.2 pound baby this week. If you didn't see it, this probably won't be that funny to you. There was a picture of a 19.2 pound newborn next to a more "normal" size newborn for comparison - the result was shocking. So, this picture cracked me up - big spider, "little" spider - however the little spider is a rather large daddy long leg :)


This is a 2x4 board ...


I'm not sure if you can really see this, but John is actually herding it outside. I have heard from a couple of different sources that there is a type of spider that when you smash it, hatches hundreds of babies ... don't know what kind it is. We didn't want to risk it with this spider, so John encouraged it outside first.


This is a better picture - with a reference to see how big it is. Yuck!!! Hopefully it doesn't have buddies still in the house :)

I'm just not sure I will ever get used to the size of the bugs here. Not sure I want to :)