I don't know what it is about Irvine, but we have encountered so much more wildlife here in our planned community than we ever did in San Jose.

Not only do we have adorable bunnies infesting the college next door, and duckies in our "backyard" virtua-creek, but oddly enough there are also crayfish. I don't know excatly how crayfish came to live in a man-made pond thing with no connection to any actual real tributaries, but they are there, nonetheless.

Sometimes, we will see entire or partial crayfish corpses in the parking lot. The first few times, it was really quite frightening to step out of my car and nearly onto what appeared to be a giant spider. See above.

Oh, and there is also a great deal of spiders. We could remove as many as five a night from our abode, and the little ones we just let slide now. It's the web-spinning ones that really bug me. After sitting upstairs for just a couple hours, I walked downstairs and collided with a web. They're industrious little bastards, even if they don't have the sense to choose a low-human, high-fly-traffic location.

Not that there would be too much trouble finding a high-fly-traffic location. Apparently, it's "fly season" now, as the guy at Ace hardware told us in order to explain why both his store and Target had no flyswatters. Eventually we found some at Sav-On, but I didn't think flyswatters would be such a precious commodity. We should have bought out their stock and re-sold them on the corner for twenty bucks each. Then again, it might be good to hang onto them for locust season or whatever else is next.