Everyone should start counting spiders

[chowmama]

15. I've heard that at no time in your life are you more than ten feet away from a spider

and sometimes I've heard it as nine feet or less.

I live in a really old house with Victorian 'balloon' construction - the walls are hollow and the floors don't extend to the outside. If you went into the attic, drilled a hole and dropped a coin, it'd make it down all the way to the basement. Between the walls is where the spiders are allowed to hang out. I especially invite them to dine on every centipede they can find. I hate centipedes and they love me. It's toxic; don't ask.

If the spiders make it inside the interior wall, I warn them out loud formally that the next time I see them, I will remove them in any way necessary, including death. They need to live in the walls, where their prey/dinner also lives anyway. Intellectually, I'm sure they don't understand English, but I seldom see them the second time I come into the same space.

Outside, I either ignore them or actively watch them. We have a small population of orb weavers that are wonderful. I did have to chase one from trying to block my front door a couple years ago; going to work was unnervingly like an old Tarzan movie and I kept trying to tell him (her?) that I was much too large for prey, but they didn't listen. After several web destructions, they moved on to another location a few feet away, where they lived quite happily till winter and I stopped having to remove web from my face while trying to see if I'd acquired the spider as well.