Road Trip II: Curse of the Hook Turns

Here I go writing sequels again.
If I can do that when I get published I’ll make a real success of my self.

Just a quick and probably pointless word about hook-turns, which came up in my last post.
Lisa from Lit and Life asked if they meant you turn in front of traffic going in the same direction.
Well you do, but you leave your turn until after the lights change.

Here is a piccie that I borrowed from Wikimedia Commons (and slightly modified).
I hope it makes what happens clear.
To further muddy the water I’ve included the instructions on how to do a hook turn from the VicRoads web site.

“A hook turn is a right turn from the left lane. If turning right at an intersection with traffic lights and a ‘Right Turn from Left Only’ hook turn sign, you must make a hook turn so as not to delay trams. To do a hook turn you must:

1. approach and enter the intersection from the left lane and indicate that you are turning right

2. move forward to the far left side of the intersection, keeping clear of the pedestrian crossings
3. remain stopped until the traffic lights on the road you are turning into have changed to green, then turn right.”

There if you are ever in Melbourne (or Ontario in Canada where I am reliably informed hook turns also happen) you’ll be equipped.

If, that is, the wombats don’t get you first.
The wombat piccie is not mine, it also is from Wikimedia.

No wombats were harmed in the making of this post.

A Monstrous Visitor and a Very Early Morning

At 2:30am this morning I was woken from a deep sleep by my other half. Half out of it, I was expecting to find that the house was burning down, or there was some medical emergency and leapt out of bed.
The cry for support was “There is a white-tailed spider out in the hall.”

Now Australia is very noted for bitey things like:

Saltwater Crocodiles:
The largest crocodile species in the world, salties account for a couple of fatalities each year in Oz.










Snakes:





Oz has something like 10 of the top 12 most venomous land snakes in the world, and many species are very common. We have a population of about one fourteenth that of the USA but have about the same number of snake bites per year (8 to 10 thousand). Due to good treatment we only have 1 or 2 fatalities each year.






Spiders:
Our funnel-web spider is legendarily dangerous, although since the development of an anti-venom in the 1980s there have been no fatalities.
The photos I have used in this post are all from the Wikimedia Commons, click to get a link.

So what about the beast I was summoned to do battle with?
A white-tailed spider, hardly worth mentioning in comparison to our other natural denizens.
Now to be fair these are not nice spiders. I use the term nice advisedly, I am one of those rare people who likes spiders and most species I will catch and move outside, for example huntsman spiders (not funnel-webs, in my opinion funnel-webs are too dangerous to mess with).

But white-tails are not nice, they are active spiders that hunt rather than catching their prey in a web. This means they frequently end up in clothes, or beds, or shoes and bites are common. In fact our number two daughter Io, was bitten by one in her bed when she was about 6. The bite caused a small ulcer on her ankle the size of a little finger nail. As a result I tend to get a bit vengeful in my approach to white-tails.

But was the level of risk worth being woken for at 2:30 am?
Besides what was a swine-flu afflicted woman doing wandering the halls at 2:30?
But maybe I am just a grumble-butt, shouldn’t a fellah leap to the defence of his family?
Even if it is just from a very small monster?