Caution: spiders inside

You know when you think you know something and then years later you find out you had it all wrong? And that's really annoying and sometimes embarrassing? Well, I had one of those moments yesterday, except instead of being embarrassing it was DISGUSTING and totally FREAKED ME OUT.

It's like this.

Cape Town is home to these wonderful things called rain spiders, also frequently called baboon spiders. They are huge (like, saucer sized), ugly, common, and revolting. And harmless. So you encounter them, you deal with them, you take a really long shower and tell everyone about your gross spider experience, and that's that.

In my case, sometimes you encounter them, you get your non-arachnophobic mother to deal with them, and then you suffer while she plays practical jokes on you involving letting the spider loose again and not telling you where, because ha ha, aren't you a wimp, they're so harmless and actually quite cool.

Through bloggity chance yesterday, however, I found myself doing a little fact checking online. Huh.

Turns out, rain spiders look like this.


Which is odd, because the ones I've so frequently encountered - and been tormented with - look like this.



They are in fact baboon spiders. Which, common usage notwithstanding, are a different sort of beast entirely. And maybe not quite harmless. Not lethal... but "aggressive". They jump, people tell me. And bite. And make you sick.

Some conclusions:
1. My mother is an EVIL COW.

2. I am unusually unlucky to have always, always encountered the nastier kind of spider, while everyone else I've spoken to since discovering this confusion had the correct idea about rain spiders all along.

3. I suppose I should really be very grateful that I didn't know my mistake at those times when I was dealing with the bloody things. That time when one fell out of my trousers just as I was about to put them on, for instance, landing between me and the door. Or the time when I woke up and saw one on the ceiling directly above me, and there was no one else in the house to deal with it. Yup... just as well I didn't know then that they were aggressive, jumpy, and venomous.

PS. Beloved has been so rude as to doubt my story. He has never seen a baboon spider in Cape Town, therefore he believes my memory is at fault. He is, of course, completely wrong, and this article backs me up - baboon spiders a-plenty in Cape Town. This article also points out, casually, that outside Africa, these little treasures are known as TARANTULAS.