Oooh! I have a giant spider living in my house. A couple weeks ago, I thought I saw something largish creep under the fridge in the middle of the night, but I wasn't sure that my eyes weren't playing tricks in the dark. Until a few minutes ago when I went to roll up the curtain of my bedroom window and saw the little critter hunched motionless right below the window where the floor meets the wall. It's very dark brown with a light fuzz of short hair all over. The body alone looks well over three centimeters, making it the largest live spider I've ever seen that wasn't under glass.

Woo hoo! Steve has arrived in Israel! I picked him up from the airport this morning, and we spent most of the day in Seth's apartment with me working and him catching up on his sleep. Now I'm gonna take him out for the full Jerusalem Shabbat experience. I don't think he knows what he's getting into.

Today in Gemara shiur, the text touched tangentially on the phenomenon of the ilonit, a woman whose congenital biology prevents her from ever experiencing puberty. Occurrences of this apparently had been observed a sufficient number of times for the Talmudic sages to have developed a method for definitively establishing whether or not a person was affected by this syndrome, in addition to deducing the legal implications of such a condition. Since I'd recently read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (excellent book, by the way), I suspected that this class of woman might share the same intersex condition as the protagonist of the novel, namely 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. I thought of this because the Tosafot commentary on the passage mentioned that this condition could be diagnosed with certainty at 20 years of age and that the presence certain masculine characteristics might hint at the condition even in childhood. Since I don't know the full details of how this determination is made, I couldn't make a truly educated guess about whether an ilonit is the same as a person with an 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, but I was curious anyway.