Friday Trio
Misplaced Sunglasses, Forgotten Folders, and Lagertha the Regal Jumping Spider
It has been A Day. One where I have suffered a veritable death of a thousand inconveniences.
There hasn’t quite been a crisis, and some parts of the day have actually gone very well. But it’s amazing how being out of sync with yourself in small ways can set the tone for everything else, or exhaust you by making you expend all of your problem-solving energy early. On Fridays, I need that problem-solving energy, because playing chamber music is like knocking out a million tiny math problems in real time while others are relying on you to keep from completely unraveling when running through, say, a Milhaud Suite.
I meet up with Bruce and Michael most Fridays at 10:30 A.M. to play music, and these are accomplished musicians with decades of experience, so I have to bring my A-game! But I almost forgot about it completely today because of a snafu with another publication I write and edit for and the bank that allows me to, you know, get paid.
It was around this time that I noticed my favorite sunglasses were missing. I would have noticed sooner, but we’ve had a stretch of very cloudy days and I guess I just haven’t had a reason to reach for them. I’m almost certain they’re somewhere in my house (which is large and easy to lose things in). I’ve offered ten dollars as a reward to the child who finds them, and what this basically means is that instead of methodically searching for a pair of sunglasses they are going to run around aimlessly and ask me every 4 minutes where I think they could be. Weeks from now I’ll find them set absentmindedly on a shelf or something, and all the kids will raise hell because their aimless running around really earned that reward.
While my mental energy has been pulled all sorts of ways today (reflected in small oversights like forgetting my music at chamber rehearsal), I’ve had some time to think about my book and plan on continuing to edit tonight. I feel the need to draw a giant timeline and many smaller, different-colored lines all over it to denote when the characters meet and part, because that’s turning out to be a very important thing to have straight that doesn’t just arrange or discover itself.
I really wish something would.
SPIDER SPOTLIGHT!
Meet Lagertha. She is a mature female Regal Jumping Spider, or Phiddipus regius. She’s about as large as this species gets, and coming up on a year old as near as I can guess since I got her from Preuss Pets last spring as an instar five or six. This is not a long-lived species (you can expect them to be with you for one to two years at most), but my gosh are they adorable, so much that they are often touted as a cure for arachnophobia.
Lagertha was not my first Regal, but was my first female and my largest jumping spider. These are native to the southeast region of the United States and can be found as far north as Georgia, but can be most reliably found in Florida. They are a warm-weather spider and sadly cannot survive as far north as Michigan except in captivity. Fortunately, there are a few really amazing local breeders, some of whom work with Preuss Pets to help them maintain a sterling reputation as a great place to shop for inverts.
Jumping spiders are very sexually dimorphic. It’s generally very easy to tell which ones are male and female by color alone, unlike with many other spider species. Females tend towards a beige, brown, and tawny coloration, whereas males are black with white-striped legs and brightly-colored green chelicerae.
Lagertha has a cautious personality and tends to tuck herself away. Memorably, I thought I lost her when she was much younger. I pulled EVERYTHING out of her enclosure to try to find her and was in a state of despair. I finally got a sieve and resigned myself to shifting through lots of dirt to look for a little spider body, but then my eye caught a brand new hide I had definitely done a superficial check in. After a day of frantically searching it turned out she had been upside-down in the hollow part of the mushroom cap, all along.
I’m really hoping that my sunglasses are just pulling a Lagertha right now and they turn up somewhere obvious in hindsight and super close to home.
Alexis is building a readership while she writes. She is working on a dark fantasy novel in which a girl discovers that if you hang onto something you love too tightly, you risk mangling it. She also enjoys writing about her violin, her spiders, and her family.