There's now a small pile of unfinished floor boards sitting in our front room. The builder & floor sub are going to do something about the countless large gaps in the floor, what that might be is beyond my intellect - I look at the floor and I see a huge, uninterrupted, swath of boards. The whole first floor, except for the tile in our bathroom, is one solid interlocking mosaic of oak boards. So how are they going to fix gaps that run 30 feet down the middle of the first floor without taking up all the boards all the way to one of the exterior walls (which means going down all the hallways and side rooms to get there) ? They can't just take out boards in the living room to fix the living room gaps, because the living room is adjacent to our bedroom, and there is no break in the floor between them. Pushing the boards towards the north exterior wall to fix a gap in the middle will create a new gap on the south side. And how can they fix the huge sagging gap in front of the closet without going all the way across the bedroom? And how are they going to finish the new boards to match?

I'm very, um, curious to find out. But, I have low expectations.

Saw people snooping around on the empty lot next to us last PM - a realtor and potential buyers. Scares me. We moved to this spot to be away from people. And we thought two acres would be more than enough to do it. But, two acres is actually a lot smaller than you might think. When there were no houses on the neighboring lots, our two acres seemed endless. Now, we're buying curtains and planting trees, for privacy. Now we know.

But, we're getting some landscaping help. And I'm growing my first real garden: peas, cukes, peppers, Brussels, Swiss chard, tomatoes, onions, and some flowers. All except the tomatoes are rocking. I built a little 5x5 wooden box, put some garden paper underneath, to stop weeds coming up from below, and filled it with dirt. Put a 40" steel wire fence around it, to keep the critters out. Deer got in there one night, when I didn't close the fence securely, and dug around. There wasn't anything big enough to bother eating, at the time, so no harm done. Planted a pink dogwood tree out in a little clearing in the woods. Should be awesome in a few years. A dogwood blooming in the woods is one of my favorite things.