There are lots of interesting critters around here. This summer (2002) during the monsoon rains we twice had a tarantula creep into the building we are living in. They show up at night, so it can be a bit startling to come across one in the dark. They are quite harmless, though, so I took this one outside the next morning and got some photos of it before it crept off into the weeds. It hard to tell the size from the picture, but it was about six inches across the tips of it's legs ... a small one.
As I mentioned, we've been collecting the rocks we pulled out of the trenches as we dug them. We carried them or rolled them into the bucket of the skid steer tractor, then dumped them into piles around the periphery of the build site. This pile represents about 5% of those we've collected so far. The larger rocks (top and foreground) are about three feet across. In case you're wondering ... yes, it was a lot of work.