Two Cleaning Lady blogs in one weekend! You guys are so lucky!
At Weston Commercial Cleaning, we specialize in carport and hand rail cleaning. For carports, we scrape all the bugs out of the corners and off the siding (as well as the lights) of carports in the condominium associations we clean. We use this toilet-brush-looking-thing. The brush part is as big as my head, so it's pretty big, and we can lengthen the pole to reach as high as the second story of many buildings. To clean the hand rails, yours truly takes two damp rags and runs up the stairs while wiping both handrails. (And I get a great leg workout!) I'm also in charge of getting rid of all the cobwebs between the railings.
And alas, my problems begin...
Down here in Florida, our spiders can get pretty big--as big as your palm big if you're talking about banana spiders. (You haven't lived until you have run into a banana spider web on the boardwalk at Clam Pass--talk about Heabie Jeabie Dance!) I've seen house spiders the same size--in my house--black widows, you name it. Some of these spiders are poisonous (black widows, brown recluses) and some aren't (banana spiders). Most of them bite.
Anyway, back to the story. I don't mind cleaning the cobwebs out of the hand rails--as long as I can see the spider that made them. Nothing is worse than a cobweb with no cob because you know the spider is out there, just waiting around for some nice woman-flesh to sink it's fangs into. To be honest, it totally freaks me out.
Today was a spider-slaughter, freak out, tingles-down-the-neck day. You should have seen these things! Yes, they were big. Yes they were scary. No, I did not do the heabie jeabie dance. But I was on edge the whole time, and it got me thinking about my worst insect/arachnid moments.
I figured I'd share the joy.
- I was four or five and I stepped in a fire-ant pile without knowing it. I stood there a while before I realized what was going on. I was wearing pants. It was a bad day.
- In second grade, I was doing push ups in PE when a fire ant crawled onto the top of my hand and bit me. I knew I would get yelled at if I stopped doing push ups, so I kept going. So did the ant. My hand swelled up.
- A few years ago, I was chaperoning with our church youth group at a camp in central Florida. We were walking through the woods when something heavy dropped on my shoulder. Andrew, who never gets nervous, nervously said, "Michelle, don't move." He brushed a huge spider the size of my palm--no joke--off my shoulder. It was an Indiana Jones moment. (No, I did not wait around to identify the type of spider.)
- Backpacking in the North Carolina mountains is wonderful. (I love anything that gets me close to nature without the Florida heat.) One on trip, the group I was with hiked through a hedge what I call "wait-a-minitutes." (Those thorny brambles that jump out and grab you and you have to say, "Wait a minute.") The group in front of us got stuck in the thorny vines. Oh, did I mention that hornets live in the brambles? Those of us in the back, unable to move forward because of the trapped souls up front, were attacked by hornets. They flew in my shirt, up my shorts, everywhere! It was horrible! They hurt worse than anything!
- I once stepped on a dead bee with bare feet--and got stung. Only me.
I've been saving the best for last:
- I put on a pair of shorts that--unbeknownst to me--a scorpion had crawled into. Yes, it stung me--twice. Yes, it hurt. I screamed, scrambled out of the shorts, and then proceeded to perform the heabie jeabie dance the moment I saw the scorpion's carcass fall onto the floor. I don't think I'll ever be the same.
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