Now, I do not particularly like spiders. We have lots of them in Arizona and they skitter around my house with abandon. I chase them and they hide, I wait for them and they do not reappear (a very wise move on their part) and they build webs, which my mother used to refer to as ‘Christmas Decorations’. When I was little, the big grey tarantula that lived on the ceiling and ate mosquitoes etc. that inhabited the house from time to time, was particularly scary to me but he was harmless to humans. My father called him “the triantiwantigong” and that is what I called him too. He was about 4 inches across and was mostly legs and a very tiny body. As he traversed the ceiling looking for unsuspecting bugs, he appeared to have way too many legs for his own good, in my child’s opinion.
Well, the Lord has sent me another spider. One from which I can draw strength (as long as he stays between my window and the screen and does not come into the house). In school we read the story of Robert the Bruce, a Scottish warrior who had been defeated 6 times by the British armies. He was in a cave (in some versions he is in a castle and others he is in a slab hut in the forest), but as he lay on his mattress feeling defeated and sorry for himself, he noticed a spider who was building a web. The spider tried and tried to make the connection so that the web could go from one wall to another and after 6 tries the spider launched out into space and finally made the connection and from thence on successfully built the web. Robert the Bruce took courage, gathered his men, and routed the English and retained Scotland for the Scotts.
This spider in my window is an Orb Weaver. In the light I can see that it has pretty markings on its abdomen and its legs are long and delicate. I have no idea how it got between my window and the screen because there does not appear to be an aperture big enough to accommodate such a large body let along let the legs remain undamaged while accessing my window space. There also seems to be a dearth of bugs at this time of year for any self respecting spider to trap and to eat. We have to eat to sustain life and the miniscule bugs that have become entrapped in the web hardly supply a tooth full for this lone spider.
So what can I learn from this spider in my window. Well for one thing, I can be patient with the digitizing and redouble my efforts to get the work done, and done properly. We have digitized one of the reworks 3 times and still they send it back. I have a good mind to package up the book and sent it to them to do for themselves. I doubt if my spider would consider going to such lengths, but it does repair its web daily and it sits in the corner of the window waiting for the bugs to show up, and they do. So I guess I will have to re-tackle the job of this one book that is giving us trouble. We are to take a reading called and LSI and to do that you have to find the thinnest line on the paper and take the reading on that and then proceed with the calibration from there and then digitize. Well the problematic book had two vastly different styles of writing. One is heavy handed, very dark ink, and jagged and hard to read and this hand written record is in the front half of the book. The rest of the book is written in very fine, light ink copperplate and is a pleasure to look at. I think the solution is to calibrate the first half of the book, stop, recalibrate to accommodate the second half of the book and if that does not do the trick, then I am totally unaware of what method of digitizing and calibration will produce an acceptable capture of the record. Another solution would be to ask the people whose court cases appear in this book, to clean up their act and not go to court at all and then we would have a blank book to digitize. Well it makes sense to me since we are having so much trouble with this one book. Either that, or have the clerk who wrote with a heavy hand, learn to do copperplate in very light ink!
Well, spider, thank you, I think, for the lesson of patience under difficult circumstances.
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