Thank you for the great quality of your blog, every time i come here, i’m amazed.

black hattitude.

Turns out around 85-90% of people may not be getting enough vitamin D!

“Vitamin D deficiency may be characterized by muscle pain, weak bones/fractures, low energy and fatigue, lowered immunity, symptoms of depression and mood swings, and sleep irregularities. ” says the source below. Vitamin D can also help SAD (seasonal affective disorder).

Source:

http://www.womentowomen.com/healthynutrition/vitamind.aspx

Consider getting supplements of vitamin D, especially if you’re in snowy areas this winter.

Then again, too much vitamin D can also be a bad thing, according to this website:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/symptoms-of-vitamin-d-overdose.html

“…Symptoms of vitamin D overdose are vomiting, nausea, poor appetite, excessive thirst, excessive urine production, loss of weight, dehydration, constipation, itchy skin, severe headache, irritability and nervousness. Heart rhythm irregularities, increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure as well as renal failure are also symptoms of the overdose.”

According to Wikipedia, “These spiders are known to hunt by waiting quietly on a vertical surface (or even a ceiling) and then rushing forward when their prey gets within close range. Their exceptional agility and speed, as well as their ability to contort and squeeze through tight spaces, give them a strong advantage both in capturing prey and evading predators. They feed at night.”

I had just arrived in Hawaii about two weeks before my encounter with a cane spider. My dad had set up a bed for me in a spare room at his place, and I was staying there with him, familiarizing myself with the strange flora and fauna of the islands: the striking smell of burning sugar cane fields, the weird, Dr. Seuss-like tufts of grass growing everywhere. We were on the island of Kaua’i, which was a bit wilder and more rural than Oahu, where Waikiki and Honolulu are.

Geckos (small, mostly transparent lizards) hung out on his house’s ceilings and walls, one of which – a baby – plopped onto my knee one day (to my delight), looking up at me and smiling cutely. Palmetto bugs, which were harder for me to get used to because they looked like big cockroaches with wings, flew clumsily around the kitchen and my bedroom, bumping into walls and falling to the floor where they fought with each other, struggling to get back up.

I had even seen one of those six-inch-long centipedes hanging out on a wall outside, all bald and segmented. But that cane spider was a big shock, even though I had grown up in 20 acres of Wisconsin wilderness and thought I had seen everything that creeped and crawled by then.

One warm, overcast morning, I awoke to the scent of plumeria blossoms and rain and walked to the bathroom, which was only a few yards away from my bed. I did my thing and exited, when I saw – not a foot above where I had just been resting my head – a big hairy spider, almost the size of my hand. It looked like a cross between a daddy-long-legs and a tarantula. It was all legs. It had fangs.

I stared in frozen horror, backing up against the wall farthest from the thing (not thinking at the time that there may be more on the wall I was touching), and tried calling for my dad. But all that came out of my mouth was “Duh… duh…” Finally, I yelled “Dad!” and the cane spider, perhaps feeling the sound waves, winced a little. I did not want to see it move any more. I had no idea if it would move slowly, skitter, fly into the air toward me, or what. Right then, I considered running all the way back to the airport, luggage be damned.

After what seemed like five minutes, my dad walked casually into the room. Never one to have a problem with bugs, he looked at me, then looked at the wall by my bed, where my eyes were still locked in horror. “Oh,” he said. “A cane spider.” Then, inexplicably, he walked back out of the room. For a few moments I obsessed about where my dad had gone, and where that creepy thing had been just five minutes ago. Was it crawling on me in my sleep? Is that what woke me up?

As my mind was racing with how I could kill the thing without it biting me, or getting its goo all over the place (Did they bleed red or green?), my dad returned with a plastic cocktail cup, the thin see-through kind with a flared edge. It looked much too small to contain that hairy monster on the wall. He was obviously preparing to try to capture it and throw it outside. Great, I thought, so that it could return later? “Um, uh…” I stammered, trying to ask if this was the best course of action, while my dad knelt on the bed and slowly placed the cup over the spider, carefully gathering up its legs as he did so. For a wonder the spider sat motionless for a few moments.

Then it decided to try moving again, stretching a hairy leg out slowly as my dad pushed the cup fully against the wall, severing one of the spider’s legs. “Damn it,” said my dad, feeling bad about hurting the thing. The leg kind of stayed pasted with grue to the wall before falling down behind the side of my bed, eliciting a groan from me. I made a mental note to deal with it later.

My dad quickly slipped a piece of paper between the spider and the wall and said, “Open the sliding door, will ya?” I did, then ducked away while he walked out with the bulging cup, setting its contents down carefully on the gravel driveway. “But Dad, he lost a leg… will he live?” I asked, not sure if I actually cared about the cane spider or was just full of morbid curiosity at that point. “Oh sure, he’ll be fine. He has seven others. Besides, I think their legs grow back.”

And that was my first and thankfully only encounter – to my knowledge, anyway – with a cane spider. But for the rest of that day, I paced around looking for more of them, and it took me a good week to sleep through the night again. For some reason, I don’t think I ever did deal with the fallen leg.

My dad didn’t help my newfound horror, regaling me with the story of his first cane spider that he found while driving his rented Suzuki Samurai down the only highway on Kaua’i. It happened on a fairly busy stretch of road, while he was in fourth gear. The spider had seemed to appear suddenly on his seatbelt, slowly crawling up his arm and over his chest, then across his neck toward the open driver’s side window, where my dad flicked him out onto the road.

He told me that he knew that he couldn’t freak out about the huge spider crawling across his neck or he would’ve crashed the car. He kept repeating to himself, “Stay calm. A car crash is worse than a spider bite.” It also helped that he had that natural easiness about bugs… but not much.

He then told me about another spider that his coworker saw at a bindery. The guy was sitting in a Plexiglas-enclosed office with one small sliding window separating his desk from the factory floor. Outside the sliding glass window was a counter. His coworker looked out the window one day to see a cane spider sitting there on the counter, just one foot from his face.

The guy just eyeballed it for a few seconds, frozen in fear as I had been, then slowwwly brought his hand up to the top of the window, quickly slamming it shut. The moment he did this, the spider jumped at his face and landed sideways on the closed window, so that the guy found himself staring into the legs and underside of it.

It is said that most cane spiders are more afraid of people than they are of them, preferring to avoid people and run away rather than bite. And their bite can be painful, but the venom is not too poisonous to us. Cane spiders do love to come indoors though, but mainly to eat the other gross bugs like the enormous (and much more venomous) centipedes and the clumsy cockroachy Palmetto bugs.

But this spiders’ true home is in the sugar cane fields of every island of Hawai’i. And though neither the spider nor the cane is originally from the islands, I hope that everyone who has ever enjoyed a delicious bag of sugar from Hawai’i, truly the best kind in the country, appreciates the collateral creepiness that this treat causes the people there.