Tom was up and out bright and early Saturday morning, with the goal of getting what was needed to hook up the water, along with a list of other things we could use to make ourselves comfortable here, but which we could take with us if the sale falls through. Our tentative plan is to make one of the cabins habitable for us to live in while we fix the other cabin up nicely for guests. To do this, we need to gut the cabin, treat it for termites, get windows and doors to seal it up, and run electricity and plumbing to it. Step one, which doesn’t require any cash, is the gutting, so I started on that. All the inside walls of the cabin were covered with cheap paneling, which was not only ugly, but which was stained and moldy and damaged since the windows were gone and the looters hadn’t worried about damaging the walls when they took the fixtures. As I pulled it down, sheet by sheet, I found lots of termite wings in the walls, as well as some lizards. At one point I looked down and saw a scorpion scooting along the floor, until it found a dark corner and curled up. I had a brief discussion with myself since common sense said I should kill it, but I have an aversion to killing things just because they happen to be in the house. However, I’d had the dogs in the cabin with me all day, and I realized that the Jack Russells would probably go after it if they saw it moving along the floor, so I took the crowbar and crushed it in the corner. I’m told that a scorpion sting is much like a bee sting, unless they’re laying eggs when it’s more dangerous, but I wasn’t sure how to tell if it was laying eggs, and I didn’t know if what was like a bee sting for a 100+ pound person could be more deadly for a 15 to 20 pound dog.
That nasty task accomplished, I continued to pull down walls. As I was moving some boards away from the next wall to be taken down, another scorpion uncurled from behind the boards. That was enough for me to collect up the dogs and lock them safely in the camper, and I went back and killed that scorpion as well.
I had a few breaks during the day as the neighbors came by to see the dogs, especially Mel. I started trying to put the faces and names together, and to figure out which families were which, and how they were all related. Tom managed to make it home just before dark, with more food, another load of tools which we can use even if we don’t stay here including a weed whacker, and the materials needed to fix the water supply. Since nothing is open on Sunday, he made sure he had enough to work with for the next day, and we made it an early night so we’d be ready for workday.
Tinkerbell unburdened for the first time in almost 3 months
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