The Creepy, Creepy Circle of Life

This morning when I left the house to go to work, Margaret wasn't in her web.  Knowing that she's had a male visitor lately, I searched the garden below her web, but found neither her nor an egg sac.  I had almost given up (maybe she'd been eaten by a bird early in the morning?), but then I looked upwards, and found this:

That's a bigass spider.

You can see that her abdomen is considerably deflated
from what it was on Monday.

I watched Margaret for several minutes.  It was fascinating
to see her crawling around the sac, using her back legs to
guide silk from her spinnarets, layering it over the sac.

None of these photos are as close or clear as I'd like, but
this is the best shot I've gotten so far of Margaret's fovea(the round, flattish part of her body between her head and
abdomen, which is gray and fuzzy). 

If I start seeing words woven into her web, you guys'll be the first to know.  Meanwhile, I'm hoping I don't get a face full of spiderlings in March on my way out the door.

By the way...

No, there's not really any garden news lately.  It's 9,000º outside (July, Texas).  The vegetable garden has been baked out of existence for the year, and I didn't have great luck with it to begin with (I was sick for about two months and couldn't take care of it, and everything either died or bolted).  High summer in Texas is about keeping up with the trees and maybe the lawn, if we're not in drought (and we're currently not, for the first time in nearly ten years, thank goodness).  My yardwork and gardening is restricted, right now, to mowing the grass really quickly first thing in the morning on Saturdays before the atmosphere catches fire. 

Next month will likely be about the same, though they're projecting an early, rainy fall because of the ENSO/El Nino, so if  I get enough time ("SCA season" begins in September), I'd like to try to spiff up the front yard some and maybe do a second, short-season veggie garden in the back to replace the one that fell flat on its face in June. 


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Spider Update

Margaret, the Golden Orb Weaver (Nephila)  who was living in my roses when last I posted, has gone CRAZY.  She's moved to the archway on my front porch (though not over the doorway, thankfully), and has more than quadrupled in size in the last several weeks.  She's now got a legspan of about five inches, and her abdomen is like the size of my thumb!  She's eating a junebug a night or more, and the other day I saw a tiny male in her web, so there may be an egg sac soon!  Yay spiders!

This is a terrible picture, but, here you go:

(that's a 3" cup hook about a foot away for scale)

She's made her web in a place where photgraphing here is nearly impossible.  During the day, she's backlit by the sun, and at night, well, you can see.  But she's really brightly colored, and her web is nearly four feet across - it takes up the ENTIRE first archway on the porch! 

This one, with the plant and the bell. I took both down one
night so that a massive thunderstorm blowing in from the north
wouldn't put that iron bell through my front porch window, and
the next morning: SPIDER. 

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