Aaah! Today was my first day of work after 10 lovely days of vacation. I had quite the un-eventful vacation, not really doing anything in particular, just chilling out and sleeping a lot at my girlfriend's place in Montreal. I played some guitar, wrote some more music, and just relaxed. Quite nice!
I got back to my apartment yesterday at around midnight, and I've sort of made it a habit by now to just inspect all the corners for spiders before I relax too much. My apartment, being a basement apartment in an old stone house, seems to be a paradise for spiders. I find a new kind of spider almost daily. This time was no exception. I found this grumpy-looking fellow sitting on the wall right next to the entrance. It looks like a tegenaria domestica, or "barn funnel weaver", although it seems abnormally large. Females of this species are normally up to 11 mm from nose to tail, and males are typically much smaller. This fellow is a male, you can tell by the palps, the things that look like long fangs with knobs on the end. But this guy is 13 mm from nose to tail, not counting legs. These nocturnal spiders are very fast runners and very often the culprit in cases where a creepy-looking running spider scares the crap out of someone, but they are actually quite harmless. Although they can give a nasty bite, they are not dangerous to humans and will usually run for cover when someone turns the lights on.
