The House

I guess I haven't reported all that much on our digs. I'm rather happy with our additional space and the location and I was pretty much able to move my Moroccan souk decor right in with nary a coat of paint. Our kitchen is fab, built-in bookshelves even faber. Basement play and rec room space is great and I don't even find it creepy to be down there alone at night watching the night before's Daily Show on the DVR (YES, I finally have DVR!) Our yard/patio is flowering, though the mosquitoes have pretty much kept me out of it. I can see myself taking more pleasure in it in the fall. But....

.... It wouldn't be Lisa's house w/o some little disturbances starting to make themselves evident. I'm home today waiting out the plumber's 4 hour window. Also took the opportunity to go to the Dr. to get some drugs to alleviate my sinus infection's pressure. We have a leaky bathtub faucet. Leaky to the point that a bucket is full in an hour and the entire tub full in 8. Didn't want to wait until the water started pouring through the lovely recessed lighting in the kitchen. Let me back up to critters for a second b/c this all sort of ties in. Last year at this time we were dealing with mouse genocide and water bugs at our rental. Part of what geared me up to move and enter the housing market. Which is sort of counter intuitive I guess, because now the pests are all my own to deal with w/o a property manager in between. Anyway... We have German cockroaches in this house, which I haven't been too freaked out about b/c I've tended to find them dead or dying from commercial bait discs. The former owners treated for them last summer and we'll do the same if necessary, but still, I've been kind of OK with them b/c they're itty bitty compared to the big narsty water bugs I'm used to - the kind I'd spray half a bottle of raid on, then if I had to, crush with my swiffer b/c I can't stand any closer contact. So, I'm handling the occasional bug, but not nearly ready to face mice again. Saturday night, after getting Leila to bed at 10:00, I'm walking downstairs, look back up towards her room for a sec and spy a mouse dropping at my eye level on the landing under the stair rail. Ok, mouse dropping in a utilities closet in the basement... wouldn't be happy with it, but might be able to put it out of mind for a bit. Mouse dropping on the 2nd floor where we sleep at night across from my daughter's doorway, pest control will be getting a call sooner rather than later. Even still, the occasional dropping I might be able to push back and convince myself that the critter/s have since slunked away into a neighbors unit if I don't see them again. It's when the bodies start showing up in traps that I get more than a little freaked. So, back to the plumbing. When we got home last night Cesar went up to fiddle with the tub to see if there was any self remedy before I scheduled the plumber. He opened up the square board outside the bathroom that conceals the pipes and started fiddling about - in the course of which he reversed the hot and cold water - a repair the former owners made before we moved in - and in shining his flashlight around discovered... that's right, a dead mouse on a trap. Now that victim could have been there for a while, who knows, but the fact that there was a trap in there that we did not set only verifies that there have been vermin problems here in the past. While all this is going on, Leila is dancing around me chirping read me Angelina Ballerina and thankfully not making the association b/t the rigid little thing in the trap she'd asked to see and the little dancing mousies in her book.

And in closing, just for that icing on the cake effect, I was out on the front stoop with Leila while she ate her freezer ice at 7:30 - I'm about to go get one of those myself as I don't think the sinus pressure on my jaw will allow me to bite much - when Cesar comes out, looks down into the grass and says oh my god, look, a baby snake! By the time we looked and he looked back down, whatever he saw was gone, but he's beyond observant so if he claims to have seen a baby snake, he probably saw a baby snake. Yay, Lisa's animal farm begins anew!