Keeping Busy...ish

For the past few weeks the country has pretty much been shut down for the holiday season. From right before Christmas until a couple of days ago a large portion of shops and general things going on were… not. It’s been quiet even right in town and has been a really nice low-key time. I’ve been doing a lot of resting up and relaxing and just getting settled in to life here, even if it’s not necessarily indicative of the life I will be leading since school won’t start for another couple of weeks yet so at the moment I’m a free agent. Since I have all this time on my hands to do with as I like I decided I would come up with some projects for myself. One of my favorite things to do when I’ve nothing better to distract me is to bake cookies- I think I made three batches last week. Fortunately there are many willing volunteers eager to help me with their disposal once I make them :) In my house itself there is no oven, only a little two burner propane stove, so when I bake there I make the food upstairs and then I carry it downstairs to bake it in the oven. It’s fun to try to maneuver the food in the rain! (This is “cyclone season,” which means it pretty much rains every day.) I also decided this would be a good time to approach some of the other domestic projects I had for myself- namely, sewing a whole bunch of stuff. I really wanted to make new curtains for my house to try and cheer it up a bit and make it look more like my own. I also have a bunch of clothing that has been made for me or given to me since I’ve been here that I would like to alter so that it fits me a bit better. So I spent all day Wednesday at the machine making forty yards of curtains (my house has a LOT of windows) and hemming up a bunch of stuff. I have a feeling the coming week holds much more of the same. It’s been entertaining and a good use of my down time, makes me feel nice and productive like I’m accomplishing stuff and so on. I basically haven’t written much because things have been pretty mellow, which has been really nice but I assume the minutia of my daily life isn’t overwhelmingly thrilling to the world at large, so I keep it to myself. Here’s a fun one though- last week I was in my house ready to go to bed and I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and glanced up at the wall to find the largest spider I have ever seen in my life (as in, not a tarantula but significantly bigger than one) with an egg sac that’s just opening up and releasing its babies out all over my wall. She was seriously one of the most impressive creatures I’ve ever seen in my life, although I must say looking at the babies starting to pour out of her sac I had visions of thousands and thousands of 4-5 inch spiders scurrying all over my house and was less than enamored with the image. It took about 15 minutes for two full-grown human beings to catch her under a bowl and transport her and her egg sac outside so that they could continue to live but in an environment other than, say, my bed. I was a little disappointed in our lack of prowess with the situation but at least we got them out without harm inflicted on any of the parties involved. Then a few days later I was hanging my new curtains and what did I see laying there on the floor in my spare-oom?
An empty egg sac.