Thank you to Fred Butler for including me in her picture postcards series for 2009 on her blog www.fredbutlerstyle.blogspot.com. This is what I submitted. ( I think mostly my parents will enjoy it. Others, maybe not!)

"My favorite moment of 2009 is pretty much summed up by this photo of a tarantula by the front door of my parent's house. It was in August when I flew to Arizona for two weeks to see my family and hang with our six dogs and green parrot. My Mom and I enjoyed being creeped out by a very large tarantula who liked to crawl by our front door and we would open the door very slowly when exiting the house so as not to smoosh the big hairy spider. Family is everything to me and I am a huge homebody, so summers in Arizona mean swimming in a pool in the middle of the desert and coming across all kinds of creatures that my parents taught me to respect. We had lazy desert days and family, hot weather and the swimming pool is my idea of heaven. The tarantula was so much fun to have hanging with us (outside, of course.)"