Hope the power supply holds up and it doesn't get too cold outside so that the local wild life wants to come inside and join you.
I know what Mrs JRT means about snakes, i try to think of them as legless lizards which around this time of year start hibernating underground in the same way as their distant ancestors but i'm afraid my deeply ingrained self-preserving evolutionary instincts are too strong...they still give me the shivers! Thanks for the description! I can't match your local fauna stories but here's a true, short story about a spider...
Spiders didn't bother me too much ;-). One night i lay awake in bed, it was very quiet, you could hear a pin drop...i became aware of a scuttling sound around the skirting boards, it lasted a few minutes and seemed quite loud, i kept thinking it was a mouse. Anyway, this scuttling sound slowly migrated around the room. The sound then changed into a quiet tip-tapping / drilling effect and it's direction now appeared to be moving slowly up the bedroom wall towards the ceiling. So i'm thinking: clever mouse, it can climb up walls! The whole experience had lasted about 20 minutes when suddenly the sound stopped; directly above my bed! There were a few seconds of silence in which my mind raced wildly and then i heard a muffled thwack sound on top of the bed cover ( i swear i felt an impact ). There followed a short scuttle sound and then silence. Having peered into the inky gloom and seen nothing i decided to gingerly slip out of bed and switch on the light. I immediately saw on the bed cover the largest-hairiest-brown-house-spider i have ever seen...i went on to discover yet another self-preserving evolutionary instinct, this time involving spiders!
