Hobo Spider (or - I'm Going To Hell)

I heard that hobo spiders were the Washington equivalent of scorpions - so recently when I saw a spider crawling around our home I looked up just enough on the internet to get kind of anxious. This morning the spider was just hanging out on the wall and it looked just like the photos of hobo spiders on the internet. Oh my. But how to be sure?

I captured it under a glass and went to a website on spider identification and it turns out that the differences between the more common "large house spider" and the hobo are barely visible to the naked eye. They recommend a magnifying glass. I tried to tell the difference anyway and couldn't. Then the pdf recommended submerging the spider in alcohol to kill it and make the differences more obvious.

So I did. And, yikes, it thrashed around in there for a while. It was not a pleasant, quick death. It was a knuckle-biting sort of death.

Oh - and - not a hobo spider as it turns out.

So, yeah, going to hell.