Noah is presently tearing up Davenport with Grandma Linda. Meanwhile, I’ve been totally horrified at the explosion of leggy insects here this summer. It’s been incredibly humid for several weeks, which has made the population of unpleasant insects increase mightily, much to my chagrin.

There’s currently a war raging in my basement, between large Wolf spiders and large Centipedes. Wolf spiders like to eat Centipedes. I’ve always been totally horrified by spiders, but in this case, I’m hoping they win. Centipedes bite, are much faster, and more hideous, in my opinion. The Wolf spiders, however, seem rather hapless by comparison. They’re big and furry..but they can’t spin webs. So they lurk in the darkness, and if you see one, it always freezes and pretends it isn’t there. Sometimes one will sit unmoving for hours while I type out email or read the news, hoping I won’t see it and lurch towards it with my big feet.

When I first moved in, I was terrified of the spiders. If I happened to come across one, it would suddenly jump to attention, and turn in my direction. This would unnerve me to no end, so usually I would go the other way. I eventually abandoned the basement to them. Fine! Take it! Just don’t come upstairs. And they never have.

But then last year, it seemed like the Wolf spider population died out, and the centipedes took over. I found myself wishing to have the hapless furry spiders back, to feast upon the even more shudder-inducing leggy fiends. At least the spiders and I had a truce. They live in the basement, and I only disturb them for storage and laundry. I never step on them.

Centipedes, however, have not signed any treaties, and I just found one in my living room! The battle is afoot!

today Noah did his first long distance bike ride: 4 blocks to Hannah’s house and back again. He did GREAT! Here is his victory photo.

Noah loves Legos, and we especially enjoy putting sets together..together. huh. anyway, just before he arrived for the summer, I was able to get an edition of the first Lego Hogwarts castle for like, $20. A great deal! This set is normally pretty spendy, and out of print, as it were! So Noah and I spent 3 days working on putting it together. Noah was the master builder, while I was his assistant and structural troubleshooter.

Here he is with his finished product:

One of the things that helped was that I grouped all the pieces by similarity so that we wouldn’t have to waste 30 minutes looking for an obscure
“dark grey two wheeler”, or some “tan slidey piece”.