What kind of spider is this?

Factual Questions
1

http://members.home.net/cattywompus/images/spider.jpg

It’s the third of it’s kind that I’ve found within the last year, and I’d really really like to know what the heck it is.
Any ideas??

2

Sidiuos Fidrichapeede, better known as ‘The Ugly Brown Nasty One’. Bites at 168 mph!

::looks both ways, winks then runs for cover::

3

Looks more like a tick to me.

4

It might be a yellow garden spider. Here’s a link with a picture:

http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/citybugs/Taxa/Arthropoda/Arachnida/Araneus/Araneus_trifolium/Argiope_aurantia(Lucas)Identification.htm

5

Oh, shucks, I can’t seem to fix that link. vBulletin is inserting a space into the url, making the link invalid. Click on it and then edit out the extra space in the “Location” bar of your browser.

It doesn’t really look the same, anyway. Mega’s spider has more drab coloration and a more angular-shaped abdomen. I agree that it looks rather like a tick, but one presumes that it’s larger than a tick, or she wouldn’t have noticed it in the first place.

6

It’s a little hard to tell from the picture, but I think we’ve had these around our house occasionally. You don’t say what size it is, but I’ll bet it’s really big (or at least seems that way :)). I went on a quest to identify them when we first noticed them haunting our garage floodlight and the eaves above the kitchen window.

And the answer is… Araneus gemma, the “cat-face” or “monkey-face” spider. According to the Colorado State University Extension Service (http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/IPM/news/pestalrt/Vol12/pestalrt23.html#sism):

(Exclamation point mine)

Does this sound like what you have?

Rick