Spider Slayer

Today I completed my third week of summer work. For those of you who are subconsciously going "Huh?" "summer work" is the four weeks that each of us students are required to work in order to pay off our school tuition. And considering all the benefits of living and attending FBI, and realizing that the only other money you pay is basically to cover room and board, the deal is not too shabby.

So any way, I've finished my third week! Now all that is left is the week of the Family Convention, which could be a challenge, but I expect it's going to be heaps of fun. What kind of work do we normally do? Well, all kinds. I'll only bother to tell you a few of the things that I've done; if I tried to mention everything it might include for anybody (girls and guys), it could be quite lengthy. Things I've done have included weeding, edging, watering, scrubbing floors for them to be waxed, turning a gray piano bench into a wood-colored one, defrosting and re-organizing a mess of a freezer (making a list of the numerous things you had no idea were in there--like a paint brush), spot cleaning carpets, shampooing carpets, scrubbing stairs with ammonia, sanding, working magic on rust stains, painting, and of course cleaning.

The past couple of days I've actually gotten to do a few extra interesting things. After spending the majority of yesterday painting window panes, I got to help do some prep-work for the Family Convention. Although I won't divulge any secrets for the sake of those who might be attending, it involved doing things like getting fluorescent orange on my thumb and writing the word "patience" over and over again nineteen times (Cara said that maybe God was trying to tell me something :).

After working an eight hour day or so, I came home, made dinner, wrote a blog post, went for a five mile bike ride, and took a dip in the lake in my clothes (because Sarah and Ruth happened to be there and they invited me in). All in all, a fun, busy day.

Today, however was a little different. Since I'm one of the last girls to be working here before the Family Convention, my mom had certain cleaning jobs she wanted me to do before I stopped, so I tackled the men's and women's restrooms in the dining hall, two lodge rooms (plus vacuuming a third), the men's and women's restrooms in the lodge, and the community room. I did other things as well, of course, like watering flowers for Ruth or fetching or baking things for Kimberly (for the Fam Con :) or carrying in groceries from the gargantuan shopping trip that my mom, Diane, and Ruth took for the Fam Con, guys' week, and snack bar. But all that is boring old hat and I want to get to the issue mentioned in my title . . .

The men's bathroom in the dining hall was crawling with spiders. Okay, not like Indiana Jones style "covering the surface of the earth" type of crawling, but crawling enough for one little room. Don't ask me why the women's bathroom hardly had any--all I can suppose is that ladies have a lower tolerance of spiders so they get rid of them faster, which would make sense because there were more spiders in the men's bathroom of the lodge as well, though not as many. Anyway, I made short work of them. A brush towards the floor and a quick stomp was enough to quickly extinguish the miniscule life, if it's worthy of being called a life. I was feeling tough and a trifle smug at how unfrightened I was and how easy it was for me to step on them (having shoes on certainly helped :), but as it turned out, I was only facing the training ground.

I killed the first batch of spiders in the morning. During my lunch break, I posted a Facebook status: "Today I am a spider slayer. If you have eight legs, you'd better watch out . . . " or words to that effect. It made sense. I'd been killing spiders, and Aunt Sharon had asked me to take care of some cobwebs outside at the lodge so I suspected that I'd be killing a few more. It was a fitting status, I just didn't know how fitting.

I started on the spider webs at the lodge right after lunch. Aunt Sharon was right--the webs WERE bad. You had to be careful you didn't walk into some of them, and there were plenty way above my head that were even worse. I had expected to only de-cobweb the a few webs outside the rooms I had cleaned, but I ended up moving from web to web until I realized that the whole downstairs needed to be done.

I speak blithely of moving from web to web. The fact is that I didn't really move all that quickly. You see, as can be expected, these homes had inhabitants, and from what Aunt Sharon had said, I understood that these inhabitants needed to be exterminated. I remember the first one I killed. I suppose that by some standards he (or she) wasn't all that large, but considering the fact that I've never killed a spider with a body the size of a dime (or was it a penny?), it may as well have been Shelob. I say this as though it was a struggle to kill my first Shelob, but it wasn't. A quick stomp--then it was over, only, unlike the miniature spiders in the bathroom, this one had blood.

A lot of blood.

Well, that was to be expected, so I moved on and kept up the stomping. Only, contrary to what I would think to be popular opinion, it got harder every time. Seriously, I'm quite sure I squished at least ten spiders that were almost all equally humongous (the only one I kept away from was one that was hanging out near some wasp nests). The act itself was easy enough, only it was leaving a trail of silver-dollar sized brown-red stains in my wake that started to gross me out. Sometimes I frantically scraped my foot on the pavement as I visualized the spider blood there.

"Her feet were red with the blood of the spiders," came to my mind. Eventually I almost thought I could tell what fat, dead spiders smelled like, but I couldn't be sure.

Sweep.

Stomp.

Sweep.

Stomp.

My peanut-butter banana sandwich that I was rather full with suddenly seemed rather unappetizing. I kept killing, but the adventure was gone. I was a grim murderer, destroying for the sake of Fairwood's future guests, trying to shake off the sensation that there was still blood clinging to my Adidas flip-flop.

And suddenly I realized how Lady Macbeth must have felt.

Sort of.