Hello, My Little Friends!

I saw the following story on the morning news this weekend, and stole this text (which I’ve edited for length) off WYFF4.com.

CONCORD, N.C. -- Older homes are expected to have some problems, but Mark Jones’ 100-year-old house has more than 60,000 of them. Jones and his wife, Amychelle, said they can sum it up in one word: insanity. Beekeepers removed 60,000 bees from the Joneses' home Sunday morning, leaving about 1,000 still buzzing inside.

Jones said it wasn’t a bee sting or the buzzing sound that tipped him off; it was a stain on the wall downstairs. “I came over here and dipped my finger in it and tasted it,” Jones said. “Sure enough, it was honey coming out of the wall.”

Jones took home video of the beekeepers as they tore down the walls to carefully collect the hives with a vacuum. They were put into three buckets and will be taken away and cared for.

“It didn’t seem right to my husband or myself to kill them,” Amychelle Jones said. Some of the thousands of bees could be seen outside the home sticking around. The beekeepers said they’ll eventually find a new home.

Now, I’m not concerned about the 1,000 bees they left there, or whether or not they killed the ones that they took out. What I want to know is what kind of person, when he sees some viscous substance oozing from the walls of his 100-year-old house, decides to stick his finger in and taste it?!

It got me thinking …

Maybe I should have sampled the black, grainy gunk that coated the walls in the back room when we first bought the AssVac. It was awfully wet back there, and we aren't that far from the bay… Maybe the whole mess was a sturgeon spawning ground, and what we had was really caviar!

Or the gem-like blobs I found when we gutted out the kitchen, the things I assumed were hardened tree-sap from the beams. Maybe, if I’d tasted it, I would have found out it was toffee, and our house was overrun with Keebler Elves!

Or how about the crystals that are always forming on the cellar walls and floor? I looked this up and decided it was probably “efflorescence” – supposedly caused by minerals and salts leaching out of groundwater when it passes through concrete. They said it’s harmless, that the only thing to do is vacuum or ignore it, and if you know me then you know I chose the latter. So it’s still down there.

Dare me to go snort some?

And, if it does turn out to be whatever it is I’m implying folks might be inclined to snort, do you think I could convince exterminators to catch-and-release a basement drug cartel? It just wouldn't seem right to my husband or myself to -- well, you know.

I don't think even Mr. Jones would be inclined to taste the mess that that would leave.


P.S.: "Amychelle"?

P.P.S. "Joneses'"?