Cleaning up.

Since our garden started to produce vegetables we kind of quit watering it. I know it's a stupid thing to do, but when we started to eat some of it it kind of tasted like asphalt. So in order to keep ourselves from getting nauseated everytime we ate something from the garden we just let it die off. When we got back from camping last weekend I looked in the backyard and saw dry stocks of corn and a watermelon patch that hadn't been watered for weeks. I became determined to clean it up before someone torched the backyard for being unsightly. When I got home from work this afternoon I put my hat on and started searching around for gloves. I found a few different pairs, but I was afraid to put them on because of the spider population in our shed and the fear of having a black widow inside. I went inside the house and asked Jeff where the gloves were and he said that he had put some inside a plastic bag in the shed. I headed back to shed, found the gloves, and put them on. I grabbed a shovel and a rake and dragged them back to what used to be a garden. I started pulling out stocks of corn, and green onions that were way to big to be useful. I felt something on my leg and just ignored it thinking it was just a dried leaf from the corn stocks but it was a little too weird feeling. I finally looked down and saw a praying mantis on my leg. Of course I freaked out and Jeff who should have been helping me, but was just watching at the time, had a little chuckle. I made him pick up the rest of the loose leafs because the mantis jumped into them when I flicked it off and there was no way I was going to get even remotely close to it again. Jeff left for work and I was alone in the backyard. The trash was full before I knew it, but there was more that had to go. I went to the watermelon patch and looked at all the watermelons that needed to be picked up and trown away. I grabbed the shovel and tried to cut the stems of the vines so I could scoop the melons up with the shovel and throw them in the trash. It didn't work very well or really even at all so I started picking up the melons with my hands and throwing them away. After I got a few of them in the trash I grabbed the shovel again and started hacking away. The next thing I knew there was rotten watermelon juice squirting up my leg. The smell was aweful, but the feeling was worse. Slimmy, yet sticky pulp all over the place. I got the patch cleaned up after gagging a few times and then moved on to the flower patch. I hauled the trash and my tools towards the house and began to pull weeds. I grabbed an armful of weeds and realized that I forgot to open the lid on the trash so I dropped everything to open the lid. When I got over to the trash I went to open the lid and would you guess the praying mantis was sitting there looking at me. I was really creeped out being stocked by this mantis so I wacked it with my glove. It flew off somewhere and I finally got my weeds into the trash, but I'm a little afraid that it is still following mearound. You can bet I'll be checking the covers in my bed tonight.