Hey, I've got a spider story too!
I worked in a daycare when T and I were first married. By the end I was the kitchen manager (think cook) and part of my job was to the kitchen laundry about once a week, cause we had so little that it wasn't worth the church investing in a washer.
What the church had though was German cockroaches and I learned real fast that if I didn't want roaches in my house not to bring in the daycare laundry until I was ready to wash it. So one day while we were in the process of moving into a different house I came in really late one Friday night. The porch was full of boxes waiting to be unpacked, so I set the basket of laundry on the front grass until I could wash it the next morning.
Get up the next day an go out to get that basket and notice a little spider web leading from the ground up to basket. Since there were tons of brown ground spiders around and I'm not real scared of them, I swiped off that web and headed for the washer. Got back there and plopped that basket down and this jumped out:
I was less than thrilled, but evidently I scared it as much as it scared me cause it sat there long enough that I was able to find something
LARGE to kill it with. This pic doesn't show it size really well, but the one I kill had a body that was as big as a half dollar and then it had
legs. 
Killing it was empowering though. I can now kill any spider around without even a shudder, cause if I could kill that thing, anything smaller is just child's play.
We have these coexisting with us in this house:
Hairwolf the cat, hunts these guys down and uses them for snack food.
