Story from last week I forgot to mention. Megan was in the corner of the office, chewing up a box she’d found. I looked over and the following thought process went through my head:

What’s that she’s got?
That’s a bit odd.
It’s black.
It’s rectangular-ish.
It’s…ohholycrapit’satonercartridge.

I don’t think I’ve ever moved so fast. I was there before she managed to get into it, but can you imagine? I don’t think I want to. Turns out the box she was chewing was the most recent, unopened, delivery from the stationers, and around the corner from me lay the entire contents, thankfully not destroyed too much. The cartridge was inside this box, inside its own packaging and inside the light-sealed black bag, all of which she got through in about ten minutes. I think a collar-mounted wireless webcam would be a worthy investment

Poor Monkey We were happily playing Monkey-fetch when his neck ripped a little. I was then forgotten about and number one priority became to remove as much stuffing as possible. I’m sure she’ll be ever so useful when I try to clear it up, too

I’ve been rasturbating madly for the past hour, and this is the result. The site can take any image and ‘rasturbate’ it to a size you specify, then create a pdf file that’s easily printable. And it actually does work very well - the effect really is quite impressive at a distance. That’s A4 paper, btw. What Mum and Dad will say when they get home and see what I’ve done to the hall, I don’t know

Just don’t even ask me about tomorrow. Just don’t. Mechanics 3 & 1 begin at 1315, and those are the third and fourth challenges of the day. I’d best be going to bed, I think.

I didn’t sleep well over the weekend and have been trying to exhaust myself today. I walked for 1.5 hours with Megan this morning while listening to This Week in Science in which I learnt about spider mating habits. I knew that in some species of spider it’s common for the female to eat the male after coitus, but what I didn’t know was that in one species each gender has two sets of genitalia. Here’s how it works:

Mr Spider approaches Ms Spider and impolitely initiates coitus. In order to prevent other spiders from taking ‘his woman’, he breaks off his penis and leaves it in situ. Ms Spider, now satisfied, becomes hungry, so eats Mr Spider. Sometimes, however, Mr Spider is a particularly strong specimen. If he survives the first attack then, being male, he thinks to himself:

“So she tried to eat me the first time, so what? She’s just playing hard to get. Wait till she gets a load of this.”

And proceeds to insert his second penis into the female’s remaining unblocked orifice, once again detaching himself from said member. Ms Spider, by now annoyed, bites off Mr Spider’s head. At some point she will dump both loads of sperm into the vicinity of her egg. This benefits the selfish genes because it increases their chance of mixing with “strong and healthy” genes. The usual “first come, first served” strategy adopted in most species has the disadvantage that the “first come” may be a poor specimen. Mixing the sperm of two different mates (not true in my example, but most don’t survive the first attack) is a way around this limitation. The same technique used to be applied in human IVF treatments, in which samples were taken from multiple family members. That doesn’t happen any more - can’t think why.

Gotta love evolution.

Anyway, I must away myself. Speak to you tomorrow afternoon…

Megan + garden pond + bounding jumpyjumpyness = one hell of a mess
UPDATE: Hmm, her bedraggled state didn’t really come through in this shot. Later today she lay down on some wet paint. So she’s in something of a state currently.

And on this note, I’m going to bed.

I realise I haven’t been updating you on the progress of Mandrake, the seven-legged spider. This must have caused much distress, and for that I apologise. There is much to update, after all. Mandrake has had an exciting week. You may recall that I first spotted him on Friday as he sat on my bathroom door looking scared. Over the course of the day he moved closer and closer toward the door handle and observed, with much hilarity, Andrew’s double-take every damn time said wuss exited the room. On Saturday morning he was still in this position, and I was starting to wonder whether he actually needed food / water at some point. I mean, you’d think he would, really. But then, how long do spiders live?

Anyway, this all became moot when, during the course of Saturday afternoon, AN AMAZING TRANSFORMATION OCCURRED. For the next time I observed Mandrake I did not see him. I saw two spiders. Two. One much larger than Mandrake. I was immediately very sad, for it appeared that Mandrake had been guzzled by some passing fascist spider with no respect for spider lack-of-cannibalism etiquette. Then, though, I took a closer look. And I found that what had appeared to be the mangled corpse of Mandrake was in fact a cuticula. Ecdysis had taken place and Mandrake had shed his exoskeleton. On my bathroom door. How marvellous. The skin is still visibly that of a spider, too. Ecdysis, according to wikipedia, is characterised by a period of inactivity, which explains why he was slowly wandering around my door for a couple of days. It was nothing to do with his lack of appendage!

But that’s not all.

Examination of Mandrake’s new form revealed a very tiny little leg where you’d expect to find the missing limb. It appears to be slightly deformed rather than eaten, or similar. Mandrake’s obviously proud of his new body, because he’s currently doing laps of the room. I keep looking for him, thinking that he’ll have disappeared, when I spot him above the shower or underneath the window. He’s been progressing for the last few days and has nearly made it back to the door.

What a clever Mandrake. I’ll keep you updated.

Ooh, I forgot to say that there was a seven legged spider in my bathroom this morning. Is that possible? Nah, one leg must have been eaten, or otherwise disposed of…I think. I’m not an arachnologist, though. I just made that word up just now. Wonder if it exists. Apparently not.

Why Megan failed the Andrex puppy auditions