MOM AND DAD came to visit me this past weekend! In my preparations for their arrival, I did a lot of laundry. For the last load I threw in a load of red blankets and sheets, went for a bike ride, and when I got home the cycle was done but the blankets were soaking wet. Poor spinning has been an intermittent problem with my washing machine, so I put it on the spin cycle again to get rid of the extra water. Unfortunately, it made a weird grindy noise and didn’t spin.
We took the machine apart as a family today and determined it’s MESSED UP. Instead of screwing around with it, I bought a new washing machine. I looked for excellent reviews on machines that weren’t ridiculously expensive. I went with a Whirlpool top-load washer. It has all good reviews, it was very affordable, and best of all, it’s red!
I had abandoned the idea of a red washer because of price, but this one just happened to be red. It was a very pleasant surprise. Yay! It will be delivered next Saturday and, in the meantime, I will try not to get too many clothes dirty. Good thing I did ALL my laundry before the big visit this weekend.
Cabinet Guy responded today. Here’s what he said:
there is a strip that goes on one of the doors to hide the gap. Those are the correct doors for that cabinets. I said if you find it necessary to get new Qdoors[sic] that I will do my best to work with the manufacture to make custom doors if all possible. Sal was going to install a strip between the doors that would have resolved this problem.
The thing is, he told me to put this strip in before and I said “No, get me some damned doors without a gap between them.” Contractor Sal took measurements for this and those are the measurements he gave to Cabinet Guy last spring. I informed Cabinet Guy of this, but it looks like we’re back where we were in January 2009.
Contractor Sal won’t be able to save me, either. He broke his foot and is out for 2 months. Perhaps we should take bets on whether or not I’ll have the doors by August.
I figured it was time for a Cabinet Guy update. There isn’t much to update since the guy has not made a peep in a long time. Today, I decided it’s time to resolve this once and for all. I sent the message below to him and to Contractor Sal. Monday’s project: find a lawyer.
Dear Cabinet Guy,
Last spring Contractor Sal gave you measurements for the doors that I am still missing in my kitchen. If you’ve forgotten, there is a set of doors on the cabinet that was ordered/shipped incorrectly that have a big gap between them. You promised to order the correct doors along with trim because some was missing and the touch up paint (which you claimed to have in your possession over a year ago). I have yet to receive any of this or hear about it.
It’s been 20 months - nearly TWO YEARS - since I started this kitchen project, and I cannot fully express the magnitude of my anger that it is not finished yet. Please let me know this week when the new doors will be in along with the trim and paint. If I do not hear from you, I am going to start pursuing other means to force you to take care of this problem. It has dragged on far too long.
K has been furiously nosing around the back of the shed. We haven’t seen the rat for a while, but this morning when I went back to check on her I saw the end of a tail slowly move under the shed. I didn’t know if it was a snake (which wouldn’t bother me) or the rat. I searched under there, but didn’t see anything.
This afternoon, K stopped sniffing and instead jammed her whole head and then the top of her body under the shed. Much to her dismay, I yanked her out of there to see the rat, stretched out along one of the cinder blocks, quite dead.
I still feel very bad about this, but I’m glad we found it and could bury it instead of discovering it by smell later on.
The rat had been back a few times since Friday, but we haven’t seen him since Tuesday morning.
Perhaps he’s tired of K tracking him through the garden.
Perhaps he heard my curses.
Perhaps he saw the new weapon.
(yes, it’s a pellet gun with a scope).
In reality, I wish I’d had the chance to use the gun. I’m not gun-happy, but I think it would have been a kinder fate than what likely happened. The last possibility is that he’s responsible for eating the full tray of rat decon that I placed under my shed and found empty today.
I hate decon. I think it is immoral and cruel and vicious and dangerous. It makes me ill to think about that rat eating decon - especially decon that I provided. At the same time, I’m also morally opposed to a rat getting into my house and rubbing rat nastiness all over my garden. I’d prefer not to kill the rat, but he has to go. I just wish it could have been quick and relatively painless.
On Friday evening I was chatting with my mom online. K was looking out the window and got the look on her face that all golden retrievers get when they see a creature. I figured there was a squirrel in the garden, so I peered out the window to see not a squirrel but a RAT eating my strawberries.
A RAT. IN MY YARD.
I tried to take a picture through the window, but I could only caught a photo of the tail and the back half.
I called Orkin who promised someone would either come after shift Friday night or that they would call me Saturday. Neither happened (not surprising given the previous responsiveness of my local branch) but I am still going to try to get in touch with someone there on Monday.
I kind of hoped it had left since I didn’t see it Saturday. However, K is very intent on hunting it and chased it out tonight as well. I guess the good news is that it runs away from the house, but still. I will be purchasing a pellet gun tomorrow in case my hunting dog and I can deal with this on our own.
Granted, I do nothing to take care of this bush. I even considered pulling it out when I moved in. I have no particular love for rose bushes. That said, it did fine last year. It made flowers. It grew leaves.
This year, it’s almost dead. I still have done absolutely nothing to it. It had leaves and flowers in the spring. Now, almost all the leaves have fallen off. The few left don’t look too hot. The branches are kind of black and dead.
I’m not desperate to save it, but I know many of you actually take care of roses. Any idea what happened? My main concern is that it’s some disease. This bush is in my veggie garden, so I’ll yank it out if this is something that may spread to my plants.
Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a million peaches. It was more like 10. But STILL!!
One of my three dwarf peach trees ripens in July. It had about a dozen peaches on it. They were little, but all yellowish golden red and within a few days of being picked. Every time I’d go outside I would check them to see if they had softened up at all so I could pick them. I checked them last night and they were doing ok. Still hard, but with a new tiny bit of give.
This morning, I reached in to check them and they were ALL GONE!!! Only one tiny peach had been missed by the theives who crept into my yard and picked all my peaches. I am very upset about this. I was so looking forward to those peaches! I have tree nets, but I didn’t think I’d need them for this. Man was I wrong.
The other two trees ripen in August. Once those peaches start showing signs of coloring, the nets will go on.
So back at the end of May Orkin came. In addition to the sermon, they killed all the inside ants and treated the outisde. I will say here that the PR person from Orkin who saw my blog acted swiftly to correct the celibacy-lecturing tech and made sure he wouldn’t come back.
However, the ants did come back. I found their nests all behind the downspout. Orkin couldn’t come immediately, so I killed them myself. There are still lots of ants particularly along the edge of the garden and the patio. I want to give them some tarro or something to kill them, but Orkin says no.
Thus I scheduled an Orkin person to come out 2 weeks ago and treat these ants and to kill the nests I may have missed. No one ever showed for that appointment so I made another one for them to come last week. Again, no one came. Finally, they called me and said “how about we just come on June 22nd like we’d planned all along?” If I’d wanted to wait a month, I wouldn’t have called to schedule visits two other times, but fine. Yet, come this morning, my ants had not been treated. I called this morning and they said they would send someone today. No one came.
So I just got off the phone with the main Orkin customer service line and the schedulewho assured me that, while it was never in the system for someone to come today, she would absolutely be here tomorrow morning. We’ll see. This is all becoming a little bit too familiar to my cabinet doors…
…which I still don’t have! When Contractor Sal came by a couple weeks ago to fix the kitchen trap, he said he’d check on them soon - once Cabinet Guy got back from his latest vacation.
My fabulous SIL Michelle and my 2 nieces are coming for a visit next week. This has created the perfect excuse for me to get things in order around here. There is still much lingering mess from the busy semester, and it’s nice to have a motivating deadline to get it all cleaned up.
That said, there is a LOT to do this week (I know you’d come whatever the state of the house, Michelle, but I’d be embarrassed if you saw it like this). I got up at 8:30 this morning, my usual time, ready to start on a big list of things.
Flashback to yesterday where I saw an ant in the pantry. I got the great idea to move one of the ant traps that Orkin left into the pantry just in case. Well, those are ant baits. They attract ants. Thus, they attracted ants to my pantry where I found a bunch of them when I put away the box of Cheerios from breakfast. I called Orkin who told me that I had a scheduled visit on the 22nd and I was absolutely not allowed to kill the ants in the pantry because it would mess with their system. The woman on the line did not seem to understand why I was completely not ok with just letting the ants camp out in there for a couple weeks. So I killed them. Windex kills them and it turns out so does GreenWorks. However, there were ants between the spice jars and on the tines of the wire shelves so, to get them all, I had to pull out and wash every little jar of spices and all the other stuff in there.
In the midst of this long stupid project, I had lunch (yes it took that long). When I was cleaning up, I realized that I’d forgotten to dispose of the pods from the peas I picked last night for dinner. I put them into the garbage disposal and ground them up until the drain clogged. I tried a few things to unclog it, thinking maybe it was just the disposal, but no. It was clogged all the way down. Luckily, I have a big red pipe wrench and have watched enough TV to know how to get into the trap under the sink. I was feeling all proud of myself until I realized that MY kitchen sink trap does not come apart. All the pieces were glued together.
I took many many steps figuring out how to get the black pipe from the disposal disconnected from the main pipes. After that, I tried snaking with the snake and with other stuff. I tried shop-vacing it (which seemed to work until I got everything reassembled). After about 5 disassemblies and reassemblies and a dozen calls to various members of my family, Brother Tom suggested I put it together, put some water in the sink and use the plunger on it. That worked! (One million points to Tom are hereby awarded).
About 5 minutes after I finished, Contractor Sal returned my call where I left a message about this poor trap situation. He came over and put in a proper one that unscrews. Now I am prepared with many skills and facilities in case this happens again.
In any case, it left a GIANT mess. Here’s about half of it.
So, by 3:30pm today, I ended up with a nicely organized pantry, everything back in working order, and very very little progress on my list of stuff to do. Just one of those days…
