Insect and Spider Identification: CLOSED: Sooo, There's this really cool Spider..., 2 by JadeRain

JadeRain wrote:
... That my Uncle Kevin told me he had that had made this huge web in his front yard... He'd taped the thing and everything.
Then I found one on my front porch. Thing about it is- It had a black hourglass in the middle of its abdomen with a yellow circle around it, which made me think it was some sort of widow spider. The one my uncle came across was about the size of a quarter, and the one I was 'house-mates' with was a little smaller in size and was missing a leg. It was really fuzzy, and had white stripes on its legs. The majority of it was this light grey/tan/brown kind of color with what looked like black spots here and there.

The web that my Uncles spider had made went from the bottom branch of a tree to the grass on the ground, while the spider I had made a web that took up about almost half of the space between the two posts that look out toward our mailbox. The pictures are of the spider that my Uncle found. Some of them are dark because they were taken at night with a not-so-good camera phone. XD

It was quite docile, as I could get rather close to the web, and blow on it (the web) without it freaking out. I'm not sure if that was its nature or if it was just sluggish because it was chilly out.

I really wanna know what kind of spider this is, and its bugging me because this is the first time I've seen one that looked like this and I cant find any pictures that are even similar to this awesome arachnid.