Tripping to Lakes Entrance

We went back to her kitchen
Put the coke all in a can
Tied up a T.V minister
In walked her dad
He started drinking coffee
Too much sugar on the go
He fell dead on the floor
He thought the coke was sweet'n'low
Well are you an illusion
Or am I just getting stoned


Was that a bit random? Perhaps, but I thought I'd take a leaf out of the book of blogging...cliches I suppose, and write out some lyrics. Although, this particular selection doesn't actually mean or reflect anything, so it's probably in vain. I just thought it was funny, and has some minute relevance to the title of this post.

Moving on, I spent the last week in Lakes Entrance and it was fun. Now, I'm back at AMS and it isn't so flash. I would write a detailed account of the trip, but that would be boring to write and to read. A quick summary would be that we slept late, got up late-ish (although earlier than I would do at home if I slept at the same time), went to the beach many times, did archery, went canoing, played lots of Singstar and ate heaps.

So, that's basically it. I don't have any photos, so I'll try to paint a picture with words. Here goes:

The flower blossoms
Ocean waves carress the shore
Seagulls soar above


Okay so that wasn't a literary masterpiece, but fun to write nonetheless.

In conclusion, Lakes Entrance was fun and I wish I was back there, and not back at AMS. AMS Majorly Sucks. Additional Maiming and Soul-sucking. A Meaningless Study. Actually, it's probably not AMS itself that is getting to me...it's more the idea of work. The very notion that I will have to do something. A chilling proposition.

Battle with the spider

It was 1.30 in the morning. There I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business. I looked up to discover a very large spider on the wall, near a vent-like grill structure. Basically horizontal bars across a small rectangular opening. As you can imagine my first reaction was of curiosity. And then shock that such a large specimen should present itself in my bedroom. Its body was about the size of the nail part of my thumb...so it was quite beyond a simple squishing. I didn't want its guts to go everywhere, even though my wall might look nice decorated with spider entrails.

Hoping that it wouldn't scurry away from its little haven of sorts, I went to arm myself with the Flyswatter of Flailing and the Insect Spray of Incurability. With these items in my arsenal I set out to rid myself of said spider, for fear of it terrorising my room while I was asleep.

My first move was to give it a gentle prod with the flyswatter, to see what its reaction would be. I was kind of expecting it to emerge more from its hole, but I guess I don't know spiders very well. I say this because its reaction was to retreat back into its little haven. I thought about leaving it be at this stage, because I figured what could it do to me if it's hiding in there? However, my obsessive nature would mean that I could never get to sleep knowing that it could still come out and crawl into my mouth and then I'd chew and eat it and it'd be really gross. So...I decided to act. I got the flyspray and gave the vent grill a good spray. A really good spray. And then I decided it wasn't enough and sprayed some more. Mind you, this grill is about 20 cm across and 10 cm tall, being about 10 cm from the top of the ceiling so it wasn't exactly the most accessible thing. I had to climb onto my desk to reach it.

Well anyway to continue the story...I could see the spider trying to get out of the vent. I could tell because I saw its legs thrashing wildly out of the grill, trying to get a foothold. Eventually it emerged from its hole. Well, half-emerged. This is when I really sprayed the spider, giving it a nice thick coat of Pea Beau. It was visibly hurting, and fell out from its little hole onto the top of the shelf that sits on my desk, where it writhed for a while and managed to crawl to the edge and fall onto my desk proper. Once there it struggled some more, spreading its cocktail of flyspray and germs onto my desk and the things on it, which was mostly CD cases in the area it fell onto. Disturbing stuff.

I needed to get rid of it, so I decided to use the flyswatter to transport it to my backyard so I could throw its carcass into the bushes. And because I'm a wuss, I decided to use a piece of tissue to help push the body onto the swatter, and not get my hands involved. Even though I suspected that this spider probably wasn't the venomous, vicious kind...well I didn't want to take any chances. I imagine that spider bites will still hurt, even if they aren't injecting death into you. So anyway, I didn't expect it to still be so twitchy, and it took a while to get it onto the swatter because at one point it crawled off and at another point (how many points can I have?) it crawled up the piece of tissue whereupon I promptly dropped the tissue and its semi-precious cargo.

EVENTUALLY (wow this has been a long story, and the whole thing only took 5 minutes!) I got the spider onto the swatter, and flung it into the bushes of my backyard. I might see if it's still there in the morning. Or maybe I should just leave it be. If it lives, I congratulate its fortitude, but warn it not to let it be seen by me in my room again...for it shall not be so lucky a second time.

Um so that's it, my battle with a spider. This is the second post devoted to such a topic. How strange. Also, I apologise if the story is written a bit blandly...you see it's almost 2 am now and Wayland needs sleep.

I feel like Beowulf, and the spider was Grendal. Okay...maybe not. For one, I'm not Scandanavian. And even though I like to think I'm strong...I don't have the strength of 40 men. And the spider was hardly a curse of God...nor was it particularly frightening apart from shock value. In fact, forget the whole Beowulf thing.

Anyway I have some photos of the spider. Here's one of it lying (mostly) deceased on my desk, with some other objects visible as comparison for size. The thing on the right is a glasses-case, and on the left is a stack of CDs.



A closer and clearer image of the spider:


So er, yeah, good night.