Weekend and a funky spider

[lederhosen]

Reasons why the green jumping spider is cool:

1. Its scientific name is Mopsus mormon. How can you not love a name like that?

2. If KISS were spiders, this is what they'd look like. (Not that I'm a KISS fan, but as spiders they'd be kinda neat.)

3. Its jump is powered not by leg muscles but by hydraulics - its little spider heart squeezes blood into the legs and makes them go sproing! Hardly ever into your hair or anything.

We cashed in some reward points from Rey's work and spent the weekend at a winery in Macedon, just near Hanging Rock with the rest of the usual Gang of Six. On the way we walked up to the summit of Hanging Rock (and all of us came back, too!) Very pretty, not too strenuous a trip, and lots of nifty rocks to be seen stacked on top of one another in improbable-looking positions.

The winery itself was pretty and the food was excellent. I tasted a few wines in the area but wasn't enthralled by anything (I'm mostly a dessert wine person, and they weren't in evidence). We didn't really do anything tremendously exciting, but we got to hang out with friends without the usual frantic schedule of our trips southwards.

Oh, and on the Saturday night silverblue hooked up to the winery's wireless connection and we got into a long-range squicking contest with naudiz. (I recommend not Googling 'Octopus Girl Takoko' from work, BTW.) The night before, we watched Mrs Henderson Presents, a very enjoyable film based on a real person who was considerate enough to live a life suited to being acted out by Judi Dench. Bob Hoskins was also very good; I hadn't seen much of him in the last few years, but this film certainly redressed that (so to speak).

Sunday was very windy and we got to the airport early, which was just as well. Our flight had been cancelled and they bumped us onto an earlier one, which after delays on the ground and then holding in the air got us to Sydney at almost exactly the time our original flight was meant to anyway.

Exercise since last update: 12km. Total: 385km/231mi. Past Weather Hills, heading for Weathertop, Sam reciting poetry. Yes, have been bloody slack this last month, but between tree-dismemberment and walking, have been getting a bit of exercise besides the treadmill, so it's not quite as bad as it looks. I think.

Comments

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

Love the spider! Jumping spiders are the best, and green? So stylish.

I bet they jump right into your hair.

[mdsteele47.livejournal.com]

This was clearly one of the many reasons that the Brits thought Australia the perfect place for a penal colony.


Uh huhhuhhuh... huhhuh... penal

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

Better hydraulics than what you expect in an illegally modified car...

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Spiders are to my hair as zits are to teenagers.

[wingedkami.livejournal.com]

At no point in that Wikipedia entry does it say anything about whether those things can kill you. I find this suspicious.

(Although now I come to think of it, a spider applied to my hair at the wrong moment (driving along a narrow cliff road, for example) could probably kill me without any need for venom.)

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

These ones are harmless, bar startling people. (And even then, they only grow to half an inch long - not nearly as imposing as the common huntsman, which probably does cause its share of car accidents. We used to have one that liked to live on the driver's-side sun visor on my father's car, until we explained to it that this was not an acceptable arrangement.)

The only Australian spiders in my 'kill without benefit of trial' category are funnelwebs, redbacks (which are actually introduced black widows anyway) and white-tails, and of those, only the funnelweb has a significant chance of actually killing anybody.