Spider Infestation

This year has been the worst ever for spiders in our basement!!!! The worst part is that they all look the same, so they must be breeding somewhere. I have killed at least 15 of this size over the past month. I was in my room when one crawled from under my bed about a half hour ago. Normally I just squish them, but I decided to catch this one so I could really look at it close and figure out what kind of spider it is. This spider is actually missing a leg because my aim was a bit off when I trapped it under the bottle and the rim caught one of its legs.  (AUGH...another spider just crawled down my wall!!!!). This needs to end!

Here is a picture of the spider I caught. If you zoom in you can see the hairs on its legs!!!! 

 Here is it's size relative to some of the stuff I laying on our table. Its not gigantic, but it sure isn't small, at least for Minnesota.

I looked up some common household spiders in Minnesota, and this spider looks closest to the grass spider. It has the same black and yellowish stripes on the front of its body. Its bottom section is slightly different shaped from some of the pictures on Google images, but every species has different variations. http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/housingandclothing/dk1033.html or http://bugguide.net/node/view/1974 both have fairly decent photographs of a grass spider. These websites also says that the spiders construct funnel webs that they retreat into, but I haven't seen any such webs in our basement. Maybe they are tucked away in the storage room, or maybe they actually live outside and accidentally find their way inside. 

The first website gives a few suggestions on how to get rid of spiders. It suggesting vacuuming and cleaning out all webs and other bugs that the spiders can feed on. I think I am going to conduct a thorough cleaning of the basement tomorrow. We might also buy some insecticide to spray around the perimeter of the house to prevent more from coming in. 

Project #1: TARDIS tree house

One of my summer project ideas is to turn my tree house into a TARDIS (time and relative dimension in space). The Tardis is the time machine used by The Doctor in the BBC television show Dr. Who. It is disguised as a 1960's police box. 

This is my tree house

This will be my tree house after I paint it

I took a picture of my tree house, and then used the paint accessory on my computer to color it like the TARDIS (we will actually paint on all 4 sides but this gives the overall idea). To complete this project, I will need to add some walls to the bottom half. This shouldn't be to hard because the frame is already in place. The only challenge will be cutting holes for the large tree branches. Once that is done, all I need to do is paint it, which my friends (who have also become Dr. Who fans) are excited to help with.
Overall, it will probably take 3-4 days to finish.
Day 1: Put walls on the second half.
Day 2-3: Paint
Day 4: add a sealant coat to protect the paint from weather
I plan to work on this project this week, I will post pictures when I am done. Hopefully it will turn out.

Greetings!

Welcome to my blog. I can't stand those emotional blogs where people just talk about their problems and how much their lives suck. I'm actually pretty content with my life so I am just going to talk about what I do this summer. I have a lot of projects that I want to start and things that I want to make, and I would like to document them somewhere. I chose the title "Event Horizon", because my blog is going to consists of the events I participate in, and once you enter the event horizon you will never be able to escape because it is just so captivating :P.  My initials also happen to be EH (figured that one out after I decided on the name...)