Cross Orbweaver, home

I love spiders, but, truth be told, I know very few of them by name. Part of the reason for this unadmirable admission of ignorance is that members of the arthropod order Araneae are often quite hard to identify and require delicate dissection of private parts to get the critter down to the species level. Another reason, alas, is because there are only so many hours in the day and they're already filled with trying to master other flora and fauna. Still, when I encounter a new spider, and it appears to be big enough and bearing distinctive field marks, I'll at least make an effort to come up with an ID. So it was when, over the past few nights, I began noticing a large, showy orb-weaver at work on her amazingly big web. My first encounter with her lair was when I noticed that she'd webbed in the kitchen door, a definite no-no that had to be discouraged. She got the hint and built her new foot-wide snare out of the way of human traffic, and, every night, she takes up a position in the middle to wait for the arrival of a bumbling, not-attentive-enough insect. My sources suggest that she's a Cross Orbweaver, a probably European species now long at-home in this country. As long as she stays in her current location, she's welcome... and a welcome model.