Yesterday, coming in the back gate with Little A, I put my hand over the gate to unlatch it and discovered the hard way that the latch was covered with spider webs. Again.

Me (wiping webs off my hands): “Aaaagh! Yuck! I keep clearing the spider webs off, but the damn spider keeps rebuilding them. I need to find it and relocate it somewhere less inconvenient…”

Little A (thoughtfully): “Well, maybe I could work with my uncle Scott and create a very sensitive motion-detector, that could detect even very small movements. And it would be hooked up to a camera, so that when the spider started building a web again, it would take pictures of it, and transmit them to your computer.”

Me (impressed but slightly puzzled): “And how would that stop the spider from making webs there?”

Little A: “Well, you would have a photo, so you would know what it looked like, and then you could do research on the internet to identify what kind of spider it was. So then you would know what sort of places it likes to live in, and you’d know where to move it to.”

I am continually amazed by her ability to come up with incredibly complex and inventive solutions to relatively simple problems.