Chickens in a box

I'm not having a good time with the bees. For starters, in both hives, the queens have snuck into a super - so everyone essentially has a brood and a half to fill with baby bees, while I am two supers (that could be full of honey) down. On the positive front, Hollywood is going great guns working with two supers above the brood +1/2, one of which was full at the weekend, so I decided to go for it and extract. Of course at the moment, I can't do this in the kitchen, basically because there isn't one, which meant uncapping and spinning the frames outside where the sink is currently. The exercise, in sweltering heat, turned into Happy Hour for every bee and wasp in The Square. And for the bees in Hollywood, Unhappy Hour, as they were absolutely incandescent with rage that I'd taken their honey and spent the rest of the afternoon chasing me around the garden, attempting to sting as much of me as possible. Working in teams, clumps of bees targeted the seams of my gloves,...

Each day we lose slightly more of our house. It's like bits of it are being very slowly shaved off and it now looks like a roman ruin reminiscent of Pompeii. I've got visions of us all being mummified in brick dust before this is over.  In the meantime I seem to have turned into the ' Invisible Woman ' off the Fast Show. Replace car enthusiasts with builders and you've pretty much summed it up. I have literally become the maker of tea, walker of puppy and ferrier (ferryier?) of children, with occasional bursts of shrillness born of being ignored, which interrupt the builders' deeply important, muttered conversations about concrete, nibs and other important issues and result in pained smiles as they listen politely, stare past my left ear - and then return to the concrete discussion.  Can anybody hear me? Only when I'm putting the kettle on apparently.