The creepy crawly thread.....

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Back in the day, when I was jogging every day (and single), I used to park out behind the local rec center. Too poor/cheap to pay for a membership, I just used their parkinglot as a convenient starting point. There were several basketball courts back there, so it was never empty, but the area of the lot that I parked in usually didn't have anyone parking there. A nearby rain runoff channel provided a handy place for critters, though...there was a skunk that I saw two or three times a month, nosing around the building, cars, etc, looking for whatever mischief he could get in to. They remind me of nothing more than a short, fat, black cat with a huge tail and white stripe down the back.
 
Yep. He'd waddle right past a group of people and not even twitch, just wanted to sniff around the trashcans or construction going on nearby. Funny little guys, though, and if they didn't have such a gawdawful defense mechanism, they'd probably make very good and entertaining pets.
 
Years ago, I was getting ready to call it a night and went down to lock up my Mustang. I opened the door to roll up the window and a dang cat slipped in between my legs and wandered across the floorboard and disappeared into the back seat. So I called out to it with a typical "c'mon, let's get out of the car...we don't belong in here...c'mon, dang it" and reached around until I felt it back there. I coaxed it out with my hand and it eventually popped out from the back floorboard and out of the car.

It was then I got a good look at it from the faint interior lights ('66 Mustangs have those underdash interiot lights, no dome lamp) and I realized it was a freakin' skunk!!

I about lost it, but remained composed while it had turned back to look at me, like "well, now what?" and I kept talking to it "ok, shoo...go home" and it wandered off into the Oleandar bush...

They can actually be docile, it's only when they're threatened that they get defensive. They have teeth and claws in the event thier spray doesn't work.
 
Way back when, I was MAC flighting back to Hawaii at the end of leave, and stopped over in TravisAFB. My next chance for a connecting flight to Hickham was the next morning, so I checked in to the barracks. Well, unfortunately, the room I got was about a 30 minute walk, and the shuttle van wasn't running that late. So I hoofed it...5 hours of sleep was worth it. I got to the area where the barracks was, but the lighting was bad and I misread the number on the back of my key, and it looked like the building they sent me to was the one marked "condemned" (if you've ever lived in single enlisted barracks, there's not much separating "livable" and "condemned". Some barracks I've been in had, literally, not been renovated since they cleaned up the bomb damage in '41). I wandered around the courtyard a bit more, and finally found the barracks I was looking for. As I was walking over to it, I noticed a huge cat. I wasn't too concerned about critters, there were huge jackrabbits all over Travis, but as we got closer to each other, it waddled into a pool of light under a streetlamp. Yup. Skunk. Biggest one I'd ever seen, and still has to be the biggest I've seen. My beagles are smaller than this guy (probably combined!)! Thankfully he took a side path. I didn't want to have to explain to the flight crew and fellow passengers why they were in oxygen masks for the flight to Hawaii...
 
Many years ago a bunch of us 10-15 were camping. Built a nice evening campfire, pulled up our chairs, and proceed to lie and embellish. After about a hour or so one of them very large white striped kitty-cats proceed to walk right up the the fire, sat down, looked at us, and proceeed to walk around the circle sniffing each one of us, while everyone froze inplace. After checking everyone out, it just ambled off into the woods.
Back in Joliet we ad skunks in the back yard all the time. Dumbbass dog got sprayed 8 or 9 times. Kept the Dawn and hydrogen peroxide ready
 
I think it's what they call a banana spider,pic does not do it justice,would fit easily on the inside of my hand...
 
The ones I always remembered calling banana spiders, while my family was stationed on Guam (as a kid, waaaaaaaaaay back when) always had a white zig-zag pattern in the center of their web. But they were huge bass-turds, this guy has to be at least a cousin! I remember catching them on the playground at school. They never bit any of us kids, as I recall, just the bugs we'd also catch and toss into the webs. Heh. Take THAT, science teachers!
 
It's that time of year again, walk out into the garden and you have to hold the arm up in front of you to avoid a face full of cobwebs, even so I still manage to bring a spider or two into the house.


This one I thought was worth a few pictures.





 
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