Why do there have to be Big Spiders?

This is a story by memory from 4 years back, when we 1st moved into our last house that had an in-ground pool. This was the 1st pool I ever had to maintain.

So we have our 1st pool, and I'm really hating it. These things are way too much trouble than what you get out of them. That's why there are community pools, that are nice and big and taken care of by OTHER PEOPLE!

Owning an in-ground pool has its own special subset of entertainment. Apparently every creature small enough to fit through the fence is Emo. At least once a week I pull out a dead baby bird, dead mole, a few dead frogs, and a buffet of insects. The worst ever was a tiny kitten. :( I had a hard time with that one.

So, basically my routine was to go out and clean the skimmer basket while I'm letting our dogs out 1st thing in the morning. This is fine in the summer months, as the sun is already peeking out, but when it got into early September, it would still be fairly dark. Since all the above mentioned critters have the potential to be deep six'd in the thing, I had the foresight to keep a bungee cord nearby that I could use as a fish hook to grab the basket's handle and pull it out without plunging my hand into the water.

On this particular day though, it was nowhere to be found. CRAP! Oh well, I just have to stick my hand in, and hope I don't feel anything squishy. Luckily I don't. Unluckily, I feel something tickly. Then more and more and MORE tickly. There are "things" climbing up my arm from the sensation, but I was still sleepy enough to be like "well, isn't that an odd sensation. I wonder what could be crawling up my arm at this hour in the morning? Well, no other way to find out than to look I guess. Ok, let's do that!"

By this time, the ticklish feeling was well past my elbow, but oddly still went down to my hands. Once I had the wherewithall to look down, I was practically face to face with 6 or so of the most ginormous spiders I had ever seen! These things were like the size of those gag gift rubber spiders, easily as big as a computer mouse!

I'm assuming our neighbors were perplexed, in that they weren't aware that a 10 year old girl was a part of our family, and why she would be out by the pool screaming at 5:00am on a weekday.

Yeah, I was a "bit unsettled" by them. After doing that flailing/wiping dance that everyone knows from prehistoric instincts stored in our DNA, I was able to control myself to try to memorize on of the spiders so I could look up what it was.

Here it is, the Rabid Wolf Spider: