It Was A Sticky Disaster!!!

Last Wednesday when I opened the door to the kitchen and walked inside, I couldn't believe my eyes. The kitchen was a disaster. I wish I had taken pictures because I have never seen it look like this. There were pots everywhere. The throw rugs were all wadded up and in a pile next to the basement door. The sink was full of jars and bowls. The stove and counters were covered in sticky stuff and to top it off, my socks were sticking to the wood floor. I couldn't imagine what had happened. Bob just doesn't leave messes like this. He actually cleans up better than I do when he works in the kitchen. But not this time. He had buckets of maple syrup on the floor and sealed jars of maple syrup on the counter, but I had no idea what to do with everything or where to start cleaning. So I just ignored it and did my own thing. When Bob got home he explained that he had brought the syrup in the house to begin processing it so it wouldn't have to be refrigerated. One of the half gallon jars had broken and the syrup had run everywhere. He tried to clean it up the best he could but he had a Bible study and had to leave. It took a couple of days of scrubbing floors and washing cabinets (even on the inside of some of them) before the stickiness was gone. At least I thought it was gone.

Friday, I went to the basement to do some laundry and was putting in a load of whites. It wasn't a full load, so I decided to throw a couple of white tablecloths that I had used at the cooking class that were in a box waiting to be washed. When I took the top one out, I noticed something creamy on it. I touched it and it was sticky. For a minute I couldn't figure out what it was, and then I figured it out. It was maple syrup. The kitchen floor expands in the winter and you can actually see into the basement between the cracks in places. Well, the syrup had dripped through the cracks of the floor into the basement onto the box of tablecloths and other treasures that happened to be in the way.

Later that afternoon, Bob was going down into the basement and I asked him to switch the laundry for me. He said he would and headed down the stairs. Too soon he came back up the stairs and I noticed he had something in his hand.

This little snake was by the deep freeze which is a couple of feet in front of the washer and dryer. I didn't go back into the basement to do the laundry. I let Bob do it. Later in the afternoon he went down in the basement again and went over where the wood pile is and on top of it were seven more little snakes. He caught all of them and took them outside. We haven't had snakes in the basement for a very long time. Bob thinks they are coming in through the foundation. He's going to try and work on it this summer. In the meantime, I'm not doing the laundry.