Silence of the Lambs and Arachnaphobia / February 14, 2010

P got up early to clean out and try to start our old farm truck Dixie. Dixie always eventually starts...and P is the "truck whisperer". After a few minutes Dixie's engine roared and within a half hour Mariah, Patty and I were ready to head to Starbucks and then to the dump. P had to pull over twice to fix the tarp from flying off.
Now the dump in our county is always one of our favorite fieldtrips. The friendlist people work there, and it is always funny to see what other people have thrown away. Dixie backed up to the 30 foot pile and the three of us jumped out of the cab donning our gloves. We rarely throw away anything that would make you gag, but this load of stuff had been sitting in the back of Dixie all winter, and most of it could no longer be identified... So we started throwing stuff into the pile as quick as possible...at times digging on our own, at others creating a chain gang to reach the stuff at the back of the truck. Something "wet" kept spattering everywhere, and I tried to keep my mouth shut so it wouldn't land in my mouth...When we were done we hopped in the truck, peeling off our gloves and Mariah pulled hand sanitizer out of her Coach bag and passed it around...a luxury P and I don't normally have when we go to the dump.
We headed to Home Depot for lumber to reside the barn.
After about an hour and a half, we left the store with 11 sheets of plywood, a roll of insulation, a window, some screws, vents, and a circular saw.
We headed home, and stopped at the house for a round of lasagna, (what Jenny Craig doesn't know won't hurt her.) Besides...we were working it off.
P and I loaded a bunch of random 2x4s we had laying around the house into the truck on top of our other treasures, and headed to the barn.
We had been dying to know what was under the old sheeting on the barn outside of the old tack room that would soon be our chicken coop. P took a hammer and a cat's paw and began to pry away the corner... I helped her pull the sheet off, and we were both filled with pleasant surprise...wonder, and then an overwhelming feeling of the creepy crawlys. We were happy to see the wall had been framed in and was dry...contrary to the rest of the barn... It at one time had been insulated, but over several years, possibly decades, all the insulation had been bunched up into several mouse highrises...It seemed to be mixed with pillow stuffing and dryer lint...which I am sure was moved in late at night from far distances. And then there were the moths...I can easily say there were hundreds...but that would be a lie. There were only about 20...but they were all about 2 inches across, and were clinging to the 2x4 studs, the insulation...the whole inside wall...we still don't get how they were surviving in there, and the whole damn thing was creepy. So we used a rake, and the cat's paw to pull all of the old insulation out of the wall...and there were the &$*!@#% spiders. I don't know what the hell kind of spiders they were, but they were &$*!@#% huge!!! I am guessing wolf spiders...and we saw at least 3 of them...each one seeming to be bigger than the previous. So after all the moths were forced to evacuate, and the spider's were disposed of in a humane fashion...(from the bottom of our boots directly to heaven)...P continued to groom the wall and I started hooking up the new cables that were buried in the trench the day before. It was another productive day full of good news. It looks as if we will only have to replace the bottom sheets of plywood instead of all of them...That will definitely move our projects ahead some!!!