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This evening we spent with our friends shakati and pmat and their family, having burgers and stuff cooked on their grill and gaming.

We just got home, and as I drove up my (short) driveway, I noticed something thin and shiny gleaming in my headlights, but I couldn't quite make out what it was. So I flipped the headlight switch to "high" and saw, to my surprise, that I was looking at a giant, round spiderweb that was centered in the middle of the driveway, about 10 feet beyond the front bumper of my car. It was anchored, with single spider strands deployed like guy wires, to the house on one side and to a bush located at the far right-hand edge of the driveway on the other. The spider, a one-centimeter-long brown one of no species I'm familiar with, was sitting in the center.

If you've never seen my driveway you may not appreciate the magnitude of this feat. The space in question is nearly 15 feet in width, and the spider had spanned it at least once (In the poor light, I couldn't tell if it was anchored on the bottom as well.) The web itself was about the size of a dinner plate.

More impressively, all of this effort was done in no more than 7 hours. I know, because I'd walked through the location of the web around 5 p.m. that evening, taking a bag of garbage to the trash cans, which live just behind the bush I mentioned, and I am certain that I walked through the area where the web was strung.

The sight of the web stretched across my driveway amused me too, because it reminded me of one of my favorite Far Side cartoons. The cartoon shows a thick web deployed across the bottom of a playground slide, with a tubby youngster about to slide down. Two spiders are lurking at the slide's base. The caption? "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings."

Now, I don't think a one-centimeter-long spider is going to manage to eat me or my car, but I think it deserves to get something out of its labor. I'll see if I can't manage not to walk through the web for another 12 hours, at least.