Catching up

As I said, we moved to our farm on March 29th, 2010. The land was brown and wet from the melting snow and ice, and the sky was gray and over-cast. The house was filthy and the floors were incredibly muddy due to the lady we bought it from going in and out moving her stuff out. There were literally thousands of dead flies and lady bugs in all the window-wells, thresholds, and all over the floors upstairs. But there was one ray of light...we decided to walk out to the barn, just to have a look, and as we walked across the yard, the clouds parted and the sun cut through the gray and shone on us as if God was giving us His blessing! We stood and prayed together, thanking Him for our new home and asking him to guide us through this new venture. It was pretty cool!
Normally I would clean a house before I started unpacking, but that was not an option this time as we couldn't put the boxes on the ground anywhere due to the wet, muddy conditions. The house is not that big and we had almost 30 years worth of accumulation of stuff from all of our travels around the world, plus all the things I had saved from my mom's house after she passed away two years before. So, there were boxes stacked 3 or 4 high on almost every square inch of open floor-space we could find, other than the pathways we left in order to move from room to room. It was all pretty overwhelming, but I began the task of unpacking and washing and finding a place for everything and trying to clean a little spot here, and a small section there as I worked my way through emptying and clearing away the boxes. I kept telling myself, "This is the last time I will ever have to do this."
Well, eventually I had things unpacked and put away, for the most part. One day I will get upstairs and sort out all the things I have stuffed into the storage areas under the eaves! Or, as my sister likes to call it, "In the land of packed-away"!
As we began to clear things away, we started to see roaches. At first I thought they must have gotten into our boxes while they were sitting in a garage in Arkansas...but no, there were just too many. It seems we had a bit of an infestation! I have never had a roach problem, other than while we lived in Africa. But I never even saw this many roaches in my house in Africa. Bigger, yes, but not as many. I went on my search for borac acid...can't buy it off the shelf at Walmart anymore. I finally found some powder at Lowe's that had borac acid in it. I spread that around after consulting my bug expert brother. We started to see a lot of dead and dying roaches after that, and soon we saw them much less frequently.
Then came the ants! My goodness...they were everywhere! In the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the back porch...this place was starting to remind me a LOT of Africa! Back to the store for ant killer. Now we are dealing with flies. I have fly strips hanging everywhere. I must kill a couple dozen every day...and still they keep coming. Now I'm thinking Egypt and the plagues! What next?
To be continued...