The Eensy-Weensy Spider

The other night I was going outside after dark to dump our kitchen scraps in the compost pile and I nearly ran into THIS:

I just saw the spider kind of floating in the air because the web wasn't visible from where I was standing. The next day, after school, it was still there, and that's when I took the pictures. The kids were fascinated.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this web, it's in the photo below, to the left of the post--you just can't see it in that light. It stretched from the floor of the deck up to the roof. The actual web part was down low, but there were several strands of web that connected it up to the roof. Amazing--and a bit creepy.

A view from the porch:

And from the side: