Black widows and goatheads

I had a busy week this week.

My ward was helping out with a service project where we were helping to remodel a house for a needy family in a week. It didn't get done, but we did a lot of work.

I feel like I didn't help out as efficiently as I could have, but it's hard when there's a finite amount of tools and space and lots of people. On Tuesday, I helped dig a trench, but it was mostly already dug.

On Wednesday, we were moving a bunch of cinder blocks piled up next to a shed. Peter Moosman told me that there was a black widow on one, so I took a stick and smashed it. Then someone who had gloves went through each individual brick and cleared off the dirt and bugs. Apparently, they found a total of four black widows in the brick pile. There were lots of earwigs, which tend to freak people out. Earwigs don't bother me; mostly I find them funny, and I find people's reaction to them funny. (I also like their etymology; apparently the "ear" comes from people believing they go in people's ears, but the "wig" is not related to fake hair but comes from "wicga," an Old English word for bug.)

After we had moved the blocks, we proceeded to weed the parking strip. There were lots of goathead plants, and if you know me, you know my utter disdain for those plants. Their seeds ("goatheads") have two extremely sharp points, sometimes sharper than most needles, and the seeds are practically indestructible. And each plant creates several long vines that extend for several feet, producing dozens of sharp stars, each star consisting of five goatheads. Of course, the goatheads stick to skin, fur, tires, shoes, everything. Thus they easily reproduce, and they are totally diabolical.

Anyway, I was pulling some goatheads away from a little boulder (my June goathead walks have made me familiar with pulling up the plants). It was a really cool rock; it appeared to be a mix of sandstone and conglomerate. (The other boulders in the parking strip were quartzites [metamorphosed sandstone], so that would make sense.) Anyway, as I was pulling out the goatheads from the base of the rock, another black widow climbed up the rock and rested in a small nook on the rock. I didn't have gloves on, so I became quite nervous about pulling weeds! I borrowed a rake-thing and scared the spider out of its resting spot, then stepped on it once it landed on the ground. It almost got away.

Black widows and goatheads are similar in that they are both attractive but dangerous. Black widows are the prettiest spiders, with their shiny, spherical bodies--no hairy ugliness. Goatheads have cute little leaves with cute yellow flowers, and the seed clusters they produce are perfect five-pointed stars. But despite their attractiveness, they are both evil. Black widows can cause severe sickness (not that they always do), and vulnerable people can die! Goatheads have aggressive reproduction habits, as I already explained, and are very painful. I'd actually say they are worse than black widows. Their effects aren't worse, but they are more common and aggressive, since black widows just hide outside.

On Thursday, I feel I was most productive, shoveling a large pile of dirt that had to be moved with wheelbarrows. Then we had to move a big pile of bricks.

On Friday, I showed up late. I didn't feel terribly productive, so I went to the vacant lot behind the fence of the house--I heard conflicting stories about whether it was part of the property. It was a yard of nightmares, as it was a yard full of goatheads. I think there were more goatheads than any other weed. I spent a good couple of hours, pulling them up, because they don't deserve to exist. And yet I don't feel like I made much of a dent because there were so many. At some point, a friendly old man with a dog walked by and talked a little bit too me. I told him that these were the "worst plants ever," and he said, "I don't have any work pants, because I don't work." He apparently misheard worst plants for work pants.

On Saturday, I didn't work at the house, because instead I was helping my grandparents move. They were moving from their condo in Salt Lake to a smaller one in Centerville. They moved in that condo after they got home from their mission when I was 10. But even though they lived in the condo for a bigger portion of my life, I don't feel as great of an attachment to it as I did for their previous house, which had four levels, a swimming pool, a hot tub, a large deck, a floor that turned purple from the sun, wallpaper with old cars on it, a bathtub with feet, a pool table, an ice cream parlor, and more.

Their new condo is smaller than their old one, and the layout is just plain ridiculous. But they will be a lot closer to us now.