Gun shots and spiders...

I woke up this morning to my husband asking me "Did you hear those gun shots about an hour ago?"

"An hour ago" meant five-thirty this morning, being that the clock said 6:30 when I first opened my eyes this morning.  I had not heard the gun shots, and for that I was grateful.

One of the nearby neighbors has set up a deer-hunting blind on his property. He sits up in that elevated blind and waits for deer to come grazing on his land.... and then it's the 'Bambi' story all over again.  Not exactly a sportsmanlike thing to do, to say the least. But it's his property, and far be it for anyone in this state to tell anyone else what they can and cannot do on their own property once they're out of the big-city limits.

So when my husband told me about the before-dawn gun shots, I thought it was that particular neighbor. My husband, however, disagreed. Because there had been so many shots, he thought that the neighbor behind us had been target-shooting.

In the dark? Who needs to shoot at a paper target before the sun comes up? (That neighbor has a shooting range set up in a corner of his property for target practice.) My husband tends to think the neighbor was practicing night-shooting, just in case.  In case of what? Predators? Burglars? Stray deer who escape from the other neighbor's property?

As for the spiders..... the first thing I did this morning as I went into the kitty-coop was to nearly step on a huge brown spider. Huge... nearly as big around as a medium-sized tarantula, but it was brown, not black, and not hairy. A steroid-laced spider, but very thin, with the thinnest legs I've ever seen on an insect.

The spider wasn't moving, but I didn't think it was dead either. I had a can of wasp spray in the coop and I grabbed it and sprayed the life out of that spider, literally. Actually, the spray came out so forcefully that it sent the spider flying into the grass outside the coop, where I sprayed it some more. Just in case.

The big brown spider, after a few minutes of twitching, went to that big spider web in the sky. And for that, I was grateful.