Signing Papers! – and building a stick pile

It is official! Yesterday Eric and I signed the papers on our contract. I thought it would be more difficult or scary or…….well I thought we would have to sign in more places or something. But it wasn’t difficult or scary at all. Then we went to the tax assessor’s office to put the taxes in our name. Again, easy as pie. We took in our contract and a form from the lawyer and that was it.

 

So – what did we really spend most of the day doing? Working outside!!! It was a glorious day and finishing painting the kitchen could wait. We picked up sticks. SO many sticks.

 

 

 

Okay not really that many sticks, but that is our stick pile. Then we raked Hickory nuts, or at least shells from Hickory nuts. Does anyone know what you should do with Hickory nuts? I read a bit about them today. Apparently there is a sweet kind and a bitter kind. I’m not yet sure which category ours fall into – guess there is only one way to find out.

 

My next job was bringing Armageddon to all the ants. You see, down where I’m from, ants make one big nest. A huge pile – you can easily tell if you have ants and it is easy to tell where to spray the bug stuff. I tracked some ants from our kitchen window back to a bed – a rather big one, under a few rocks. Then later I started looking around and I saw more ants, going different places. I intently followed each set of ants back to the holes and I found hole after hole after hole. There are ants EVERYWHERE. Apparently in Illinois ants don’t like to live together as one big happy family. They would rather have ant condo communities and retirement communities and you get the picture – LOTS of ants.

 

I’ve been told I just need to accept that ants are a part of life here. Inevitably, once a season, sugar ants will appear in the kitchen. Maybe it is my memory of Texas fire ants (which we don’t seem to have around here) but I have a very large aversion to ants and I don’t want to see them in my kitchen once a year. Someone needs to invent something for this.

 

So, after the sticks and the nuts and the ants, I raked the grass. And mom, you would be proud of me. I did not use a stupid people bags and I did not set my grass out by the side of the road. I have saved it in the stick pile for future composting use.

 

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