Busy bees.....

It feels like a busy little hive here this past week. Waylon is still underneath the house tacking up the pink blankets of insulation. Every morning, he pulls into our driveway at 6:45, so prompt that we could set the clocks by his arrival. (He has renewed our faith in local handymen.) Every afternoon, my husband goes to Home Depot for as many rolls of insulation as his car will hold. (You need to get a truck! say the neighbors.) Waylon found a 14-inch long black "chicken-snake" underneath the house yesterday and he killed it with a garden hoe. (You need to gun a shotgun! say the neighbors.)

I'm learning more about snakes than I care to know. Waylon says the snakes flick out their tongues to smell what's going on and moving around them. He says they lay their eggs and then go off and leave them, the baby snakes breaking out of the eggs as they grow. I forgot to ask Waylon how many eggs they lay at a time. Six? Sixteen? Sixty? Maybe I don't even want to know. Yesterday's snake was the first sign of life that Waylon found underneath the house. "Pretty dang clean under there.... no trash, no water, no animal droppings." Just the one snake, that Waylon saw before he got too close to it, so he backed his way out from under the house, went into our garage for the hoe, then crawled back in there to kill it.

The yard guys are also here today...... Mario and his son, cutting and clipping and trimming. The cats are inside the house, listening to the tacking of the insulation and the engines of the riding mowers. For once, they are happy to be inside the house. I think, after all these days of Waylon working underneath the house, the cats are used to the new routine--- being inside while work is being done outside.

We've had more than a few heating/air-conditioning companies come by this past couple of weeks to give us estimates on replacing the furnace and a/c units. We can either get everything done at once, or just replace the older, less-efficient models that can bite the dust at any time. Between the insulation under the house that's being done now, and the insulation that my husband did up in the attic a few months ago, plus the new heating and a/c units, the energy usage in this house should be a lot better. With the frigid days of this past winter, so unusual for this part of the state, it would have been nice if the sellers of this house had thought to insulate all of this. Why anyone would renovate a house this size and not insulate the heck out of it is just beyond me.

We continue to water the vegetable patch where the corn is growing. Only thing, the ears don't look like they've been growing much at all. They seem to have quit growing a couple of weeks ago, and the ears that are there are very small. Now that the raccoon has been re-located to the lake, we thought we'd be picking fresh corn and having it every night with dinner. The corn has other ideas. And so do the chickens. This morning as my husband was watering half of the corn stalks, the chickens were pecking away at ears on the other half of the garden. My husband is ready to just give up on the corn that's out there and plant new seeds and try again. I'm ready to just write fresh corn on my grocery list.