The decision: do the spraying ourselves, or call in an exterminator?

The problem: we spotted a healthy and happy black widow spider with a huge web right outside the guest bedroom.

I don't like spiders, and I especially don't like them making happy little nests right outside my guest bedroom when I've got three guests coming to stay with us in the next 30 days.

Either way, her days are numbered.It's been a quiet day at work—things coming in slowly but steadily, so the day has passed quickly. I'm ready to go home, although I'm not totally sure of what I'm going to do when I get there. Perhaps clean the kitchen or something eminently useful like that. Or maybe I'll just sprawl out on the guest bed and read for a couple of hours—that sounds pretty good.

I totally forgot to set meat out to thaw, so I guess that we'll be having leftover chili tonight. We'll live.

Today's "Reassuring Friend When I Needed It" award goes to Brad for saying something really really simple to me last night that made me feel like, well, not quite the dork I usually feel like…

Here I sit at my computer desk at the end of another day. Edmund is perched on top of the desk, sunning himself under the lights of the ceiling fan and looking beatifically down upon his chosen human.

All is well here in my quiet little corner of the world. Jeff is curled up in bed, reading Iain Banks' Use Of Weapons. I'm pleased that he's finally getting addicted to this lovely (and unfortunately, mostly out-of-print) science fiction series. Mostly, I just want someone to talk to about what I'm reading.

I'm thinking that perhaps I've lost what few vestiges of common sense that I had lying around in my malfunctioning little brain. So it's Monday, July 3, and the husband-spousal-unit-person has the day off and I don't. He stayed up a bit late last night washing clothes, because we were bordering on the "if we don't wash clothes tonight we're going naked tomorrow" thing.