My husband? Totally, completely, wildly awesome.

After my whining yesterday, he was careful to roll right out of bed after only one "snooze" this morning, and got Penny dressed right away, and he took the dirty diaper that happened before we left the house.

Whoo!

So we leave the house, and there's a wonderful pea-soup fog clinging to everything, and Matt goes to stash his bag and lunchbox and stuff in his car, leaving me to "help" Penny down the stairs. (Help is in quotes because she doesn't actually need any help getting down the stairs; what is required is that someone hold her hand/wrist and make sure she actually goes down the stairs, and does not decide it would be funny to run down to the other end of the porch and make us come and get her.)

Penny is fascinated by the fog. "Snow!" she gushes.

"No, sweetie, it's not snow. It's mist. Or fog."

Penny clumps down the stairs, and looks up at the sky. "Raining!"

"No, honey, it's not raining. Just fog." Matt is cleaning condensation off his car. I take my stuff to my car, put it in, and get out the towel I keep in there for that kind of job, leaving Penny to tromp around in the grass. She's still insisting that it's raining.

Just as I'm about to wipe off the back window, Matt says -- okay, here's the thing. My hearing is kind of broken. I have to concentrate closely on someone who's talking in order to catch what they're saying. The end result is that if I'm not already paying attention, I almost always miss the first couple of words that someone says to me.

It's not usually a big deal. I work from context a lot. It drives Matt slightly crazy when I miss important qualifiers at the beginning of a sentence, but it would drive him crazier if I said, "Huh?" after every sentence, like I used to do back in high school.

So anyway, I'm getting ready to clean off the car and Matt says, "((mumblemumble)) --big. I'm surprised you're standing so close to it."

Big? What's big? Just then, the warning bell goes off in my head, but it's too late. The orders have already been sent down my nervous system to turn my head and look.

It's September. You know what happens, in September and October, around here? Harvest spiders, that's what. (I've talked about this before. Not real harvest spiders, just these enormous freaking brown/black guys that build huge webs all over everything in the fall.)

This one is more ambitious than most. The anchor thread for his web is attached to the house, and it runs all the way down to the radio antenna on my car. The web itself is at least four feet across, gorgeously painted by the fog. And only about two feet from my face. The inhabitant is a bit further away, at the far end of the web from me, and thank all the gods, not moving.

As it was, I screamed and teleported about four feet down the driveway. It would've been further, but Matt thought I was coming to him for a hug, and put his arms around me. I didn't actually want a hug. I wanted to get further away, but apparently I can't teleport through solid matter.

"I'm sorry!" Matt said. "I thought you'd seen it."

I'm really astonished that I hadn't. The web was practically glowing, covered in mist. It was honestly beautiful, and I kind of wanted to take a picture of it, but my camera was in my bag in the car, and there was No Fucking Way I was going that close until the thing was removed.

Matt grabbed Penny and put her in his car, and went into the house for a broom while I buckled her in. In the safe confines of Matt's car.

Matt brushed the spider out of the web, and then found it again and stamped on it. He even brushed the bits of its corpse into the grass, and cleaned the rest of the web off my car, though webs only bother me because they imply the presence of their builders.

Matt? One hundred percent wonderful.

What a wonderful start to the day.

--Liz