January 13, 2010
The Arachnid Blues or How to Maintain Your Websites…Arachnid Style
I kid with friends about the fact that it’s perennially Halloween around my house, what with the ever-present and ever-expanding spider webs that greet my visitors.
I consider the removal of the webs to be a sort of sacrilegious process that is better left to experts. (Who these experts would be, I can’t imagine. I just know that this is not my classification.) I can actually proffer a theory and attendant line about dusting that is applicable to most areas of household duties.
“If I do that [insert any household task], it’s just going to [insert action that relates to aforementioned task)] again.”
Feel free to try this with something like vacuuming. “If I vacuum the livingroom, it’s just going to get dirty again.” For those of you who are verbivores, it’s a household task frame sentence, if you will. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, your numbers are swelling!
I most often apply this line of reasoning to dust accumulation because that seems to be the peskiest and most noticeable household cleaning problem I experience and, given the propensity of spiders to conduct their web magic seven stories high, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, I am not often at the ready to clean up their newest creations. I approach the whole deal with empirical science, replete with sound, lab-duplicable, observational data. I figure spiders can’t live forever, so I wait them out.
Rather than wasting time keeping up with the errant arachnids I rely upon a more natural process – life expectancy. Like their human roommates, spiders cannot live forever although, fortunately, this span is less than my own, so I wait until these trapeze artists die of natural causes. Within a day or so of expiration, I clean up their webs, in one final, “Whoosh!” of my broom, confident in the knowledge that this particular eight-legged master weaver won’t be spinning any new works of art for me.
In this way I respect the spinner’s dual avocations of web making and hanging around. They’ve had their fun which consisted of a nice natural life cycle, free of human intervention and violence and I’ve sidestepped one of my most challenging household duties.
In addition, I hold no resentment over having to clean up after them on this one-tie basis. The only flaw in my approach is that it seems when one harvestman leaves the most desirable area in the household (and there are many), ascending to a higher plane of arachnid existence, one of his little spider buddies takes his place the very next day.
The passing on of spider friends must be akin to hanging up a real estate sign out in front of the previous web site. (No, I’m not talking about the http://www.spider.com/ kind of website.) I haven’t worked out the details on making the “just abandoned” area inhospitable for future spider dwellers. Rest assured that I’m working on this problem for the greater human good and I’ll get back to you, just as soon as I possibly can with my findings. By the way, before I go…how old are you?
I kid with friends about the fact that it’s perennially Halloween around my house, what with the ever-present and ever-expanding spider webs that greet my visitors.
I consider the removal of the webs to be a sort of sacrilegious process that is better left to experts. (Who these experts would be, I can’t imagine. I just know that this is not my classification.) I can actually proffer a theory and attendant line about dusting that is applicable to most areas of household duties.
“If I do that [insert any household task], it’s just going to [insert action that relates to aforementioned task)] again.”
Feel free to try this with something like vacuuming. “If I vacuum the livingroom, it’s just going to get dirty again.” For those of you who are verbivores, it’s a household task frame sentence, if you will. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, your numbers are swelling!
I most often apply this line of reasoning to dust accumulation because that seems to be the peskiest and most noticeable household cleaning problem I experience and, given the propensity of spiders to conduct their web magic seven stories high, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, I am not often at the ready to clean up their newest creations. I approach the whole deal with empirical science, replete with sound, lab-duplicable, observational data. I figure spiders can’t live forever, so I wait them out.
Rather than wasting time keeping up with the errant arachnids I rely upon a more natural process – life expectancy. Like their human roommates, spiders cannot live forever although, fortunately, this span is less than my own, so I wait until these trapeze artists die of natural causes. Within a day or so of expiration, I clean up their webs, in one final, “Whoosh!” of my broom, confident in the knowledge that this particular eight-legged master weaver won’t be spinning any new works of art for me.
In this way I respect the spinner’s dual avocations of web making and hanging around. They’ve had their fun which consisted of a nice natural life cycle, free of human intervention and violence and I’ve sidestepped one of my most challenging household duties.
In addition, I hold no resentment over having to clean up after them on this one-tie basis. The only flaw in my approach is that it seems when one harvestman leaves the most desirable area in the household (and there are many), ascending to a higher plane of arachnid existence, one of his little spider buddies takes his place the very next day.
The passing on of spider friends must be akin to hanging up a real estate sign out in front of the previous web site. (No, I’m not talking about the http://www.spider.com/ kind of website.) I haven’t worked out the details on making the “just abandoned” area inhospitable for future spider dwellers. Rest assured that I’m working on this problem for the greater human good and I’ll get back to you, just as soon as I possibly can with my findings. By the way, before I go…how old are you?
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