redback

I found a large redback spider living in our outdoor furniture today.  In ten years of living in Sydney this is the first redback I've seen here.  Growing up in Brisbane we saw them all the time in our backyard and sometimes in the house.  Once I pulled the mail out of our mailbox and there was the biggest one I had ever seen sitting there on the letters just near my fingers.  I dropped the mail and ran.  For you non-Australians, redback spiders are highly poisonous.  Adults will generally survive a bite but it will make you pretty sick.  Children can die from it.

Anyway you should be proud of me.  I managed today to be brave enough to run and get the camera to take a picture of the spider before freaking out and killing it.  However it did shake me up a little bit as later on when a cockroach ran over my foot I have to say I reacted quite unprofessionally.