Spring cleaning

There are cobwebs everywhere. What's more embarrassing is that a spider has taken up residence under my bedside table and insists on spinning a web between the table and my mattress. I've tried to convince her not to, but she's persistent.

I think a new spider has taken up residence in my wing mirror, spinning a very different kind of web from the ones CJ used to make. I'm a little sad about that.

In the spirit of spring cleaning, I took it upon myself to completely rebuild, rewrite, rewire and otherwise overhaul Cowboy's website. I made the first version (which is no longer available to view - possibly a blessing) in one stressful day, sitting in a trailer while Cowboy wandered in and out, hoping I was done.

The new and improved version took me all week, in sessions of about three hours at a time. It is finally finished, and is up and running. I'm pretty pleased with it, if I do say so myself.

Phew.

She's alive! (And Thanksgiving)

CJ Cregg the spider, from my previous post, is alive and well and has survived the cold snap we had recently. I saw her slender leg peeking out from behind my wing mirror today, and she had spun a beautiful new web.

I then drove at 50mph down the A3 to go and see my brother and destroyed it. I feel rather bad about that.

It's Thanksgiving over in America (I'd say 'today', but it's past midnight here in the UK, and it's still yesterday in America, so... never mind), and I'm not entirely clear what Thanksgiving is about beyond the fact that it's about giving thanks.

Thanks for my glorious, technicolour, surround sound life. Thanks for my Cowboy. Thanks for my friends and family. Thanks for my good health. Thanks for the amazing teachers out in the world. More on teachers later.

Thanks for cramming everything I have to do this month into three days. I appreciate that.

"Shove it up your ass, Toby."

I had this whole clever idea for a post I wanted to do. Bear with me on this one.

In the driver's side wing mirror of my car, there is a spider who has made a web between the door and the mirror for the last couple of months. Sometimes she will be in the web when I set off for a journey, until the vibrations send her scurrying back to her den behind the mirror itself, and sometimes she's securely stowed before I go anywhere.

She is a false widow spider, I discovered, when I caught her reflection in the mirror. They've had a lot of bad press this year, with a great deal of scaremongering and wars waged on them. False widow spiders have been around since I was a kid - I remember picking them up and letting them run around my hands before I developed a healthy, pathological phobia of spiders. I've never been bitten by one, to my knowledge - and I have been bitten by spiders before - and have never needed medical attention for a spider bite. Spiders keep bugs out of my house and don't tend to purposely ruin my life, so I do not advocate spider hate in any way.

To that end, I was planning to do a post on the false widow who lives in my wing mirror. For convenience, I gave her a name so that I could talk to her as I drove around town. I wanted a name that conjured up somebody strong, and superbly skilled, because the webs this spider weaves are truly beautiful. I needed a name that commanded a sense of intelligence and logic, because this spider has a more extensive knowledge of forces, cantilevers, tension and vibration than any structural engineer on the planet. I needed a name that suggested femininity without girlishness. She's a spider, after all (only the ladies spin webs that they live in for a prolonged amount of time, in any spider species), and she's probably not one to worry about what she's wearing.

I wanted so badly to get a picture of her so that I could show her to you, and spark off the post I really wanted to write - the post that said "Hey, don't be mean about spiders, they do a really good job and it's not always easy, some of those bugs are four times the size of the spider" and a post that also said "FYI, this is my most favourite person right now." But this spider, in her wisdom, has hidden from me for a few days. She emerged whilst I was in the countryside at the weekend and spun a brand new web ready for me to tear it to shreds at 70mph on the motorway, and I saw her briefly as she came out to look at the damage and retreat resignedly a moment later. I've not seen her since, and it's been rather cold. She may have died.

So no picture. Here's a picture of a false widow that I found on Google. It'll have to do. Don't hate on the false widows.

I named her CJ, after CJ Cregg from The West Wing. A woman who handles the press with deft poise, who comes back stronger after any hurdle she faces, who has climbed high in a workplace where men (often egotistical and brutish) strut about and throw their weight around while she quietly sets a trap or forms a plan. CJ fights for other women, takes a bite out of the men around her who often seem to underestimate her. The plight of people who are not as privileged as she is moves her to tears, more than once.

You know if I was living in Qumar I wouldn't be allowed to say ‘shove it up your ass Toby.’ But since I'm not, shove it up your ass Toby.

- CJ
The West Wing 3.09 The Women of Qumar

I love how she cares about people she's never met, and how she uses every bit of her freedom to make a difference, even if it's just in a small way. She is sensitive and sharp, gentle and fierce. She is astounding. Very sadly, she is fictional.

Allison Janney, however, is not fictional, and I think she's a superb human being, beautiful and talented. I have quite the girl crush.

Perspective: Spiders vs South Dakota

Like many people I'm sure, I am often lacking in a sense of perspective. I have a tendency towards drama and exaggeration.

"There was this spider in my house and it was literally about twenty feet across and had laser eyes and napalm breath!"

Well, look at the sucker. I wasn't that far off...


Sorry for the gigantic spider image. That should maybe have come with a warning...

I woke up today convinced that the next two years were going to be difficult and terrible and miserable, and that I would genuinely be better off staying in bed all day.

Then I got hungry, so I ate two banana maple oatmeal cookies and had a cup of tea, and life didn't seem so bad. I did some research into various things that have been troubling me, and read some magazines, and dealt with a couple of business issues. I took a step in arranging to catch up on the classes I've missed over the last few days (due to certainty that bed would be a better place to be - thanks, Black Dog).

Then I read about South Dakota and the snow storms. To those of us living in cushy little England where it barely dips below freezing and there's a Tesco's on every corner, understanding just how devastating and destructive the weather has just been is a little difficult.

Dating a cowboy means I can see how the loss of a vast proportion of your livestock would be damaging both financially and emotionally. Many ranchers put their cattle before themselves time and time again, sacrificing lazy lie-ins to go and feed and check up on their animals. Whole families revolve around the cycles of cattle: brandings and sortings and shipping.

I've started to see my future with Cowboy as having a large element of cow in it - he'd like to run a small herd of cows one day, alongside our horse business. That means I will probably have to help with the round-up, the branding, the sorting, the shipping. It means I will have to get up early to help feed (if only to help feed the hungry humans who go and do the real hard work). It means we might have to put our bedroom on the ground floor of the house so that when there's a sick cow or a difficult calving, Cowboy can go out every two hours without disturbing the kids or having to negotiate the stairs in his exhaustion.

Reading about those who have lost their cattle, and some who have lost their lives, was rather more emotional than I expected. It certainly put my problems a little more in perspective, made me rethink what was really important, and gave me a kick up the backside that I sorely needed.