Have you ever been out driving at night, minding your own business, carefully navigating the familiar streets that lead you home, humming along to a little Buble on the radio, when suddenly from out of nowhere a giant spider drops on your windshield and crouches there right in front of your face staring at you and you scream one of those blood-curdling movie screams and swerve all over the road narrowly missing an oncoming truck?

No?

Uh, yeah. Yeah, me either.

But if that had happened to me, I would have spent the rest of the night jumping six feet in the air any time something brushed across my skin. And then the next day I would have come very close to wetting myself when I found this hanging out on top of my strawberries:

Instead, I handled myself in a very calm and mature manner, and I certainly did not drag the children in the house locking all doors and windows behind us. Nor did I begin a frantic internet search for a spider identification chart, completely convinced that our yard was now home to the poisonous hobo spider. And of course I would never have left a frenzied message on our local arachnologist’s answering machine, rambling nonsensically about death and poison and kill please now. Because that would have been silly. And I would have felt really dumb when I found out it was merely a harmless grass spider. Reeeeeeeeeally dumb.