Under Construction...again

Finally after 3 weeks of waiting the materials for our fence have come in.

Yesterday the man and his dad rented an auger and went to digging some post holes.
Two of them were a pain in the ass because of massive amounts of concrete burried in our yard and roots from our huge tree. But by 7:30 we had it done.

So I left for work this morning and the man went to putting it together. After one hitch (they cut the holes to small on one of the posts) he was rolling along.

by 9:30
the first section was up.







By 10:10
the second section was done.






I am wondering if he is going to send me a pic for all 7 sections. Only time will tell.

Once the fence is done we are going to sod the whole yard, so that we can finally have grass. We haven't had grass in the back yard since we moved in. When we moved in there were two small trees, a brick wall planter area around that and a pond in the corner where the fence is going. The rest of the yard was pavers with stuff growing through them and the rest was mulch. I think the people that lived there previously must have hated mowing the lawn, so they just got rid of it. And along the edges of the yard was overgrown irises. The roots of them were all over the place. I have been ripping it out since we moved in, not because I don't like it but because it is everywhere. It's growing in the middle of the lawn in the front. It seems to just move to new places when I rip it out.

The front yard was another nightmare. There were 15-20 completely overgrown, never trimmed azalea's, pachysandra and ivy. Then there was a small patch of grass maybe 10-20 ft in the middle with some odd palm tree looking thing in the middle. Oh and iris's everywhere there too. We still find it trying to come up in the middle of the front lawn.

Oog I hurt and other good times

This weekend was a little more entertaining than I have had in a while.

Saturday was our neighborhood Progressive Dinner. It is a lot of fun. It involves going to a different neighbors house for each course of dinner. And everyone walks through the neighborhood with their wine or beer coolers to all the houses. So there was an appetizer, salad, entree and desert house. We skipped the apps because it was at the asshole neighbor who called the township on us's house, yup them. So we went right to salads at the scheduled time. It was cool, turns out it was a the house of a guy who I grew up living two houses away from. The other courses were at two houses that had been remodeled and I became jealous of their kitchens. But it was really fun.

Sunday the man decided that he wanted to insulate and sheet rock the garage. This involved a trip to Home Depot. Which is not usually a big deal. But we managed to get a cart that would not go straight. And once you have 14 sheets of sheet rock and insulation and spackle becomes a freakin nightmare. Just trying to maneuver the damn thing was evil. The man was in the front pulling and I was pushing and trying to steer the damn thing. It was all a pain but we made it to the checkout, but as we are going through people were just getting in the way. I mean we had a HUGE load of stuff and were saying hey look out we don't want to hit you, and people wouldn't get out of the way, we almost knocked a bunch of people over.
And while trying to get it through checkout the man pulled the damn thing and it started turning, and my hand happened to be in the way and it got crushed. Instant purple knuckles and swelling. Then when we finally got it almost out the door, IT HAPPENED AGAIN! So my left hand is freakin killing me.

We finally got it outside and someone came over to help us. Yes this whole time people were just watching us struggle with the damn thing.

So now my left hand hurts, and my trapezius muscle is all tight and owwy from pulling the damn cart and lifting sheet rock.

We almost got the garage done though. It's about 3/4 sheet rocked now, so soon we will be able to put up shelves and build a work bench and stuff to organize our crap. YAY

Mouse Update

I think we may be mouse free. To ease Dykewife's mind, we have field mice in our area. Leetle tiny brown field mice. I think those are the only one's I have ever seen around here. I grew up in a house that backed up to woods and we had mice every once and a while and they always looked the same, leetle and brown.

Now my only problem is dealing with the smell. The man can't smell it, but I can because I know the smell from dealing with them at my mom's and at my first house. It's a rather specific rotting smell.

So I am attempting to cover it by placing glasses with peppermint oil soaked cotton balls in areas where we caught the little fuckers. I think it's working because I am smelling peppermint when I walk around the house, so that's a good thing.

Spam phone call

I just got a random call on my cell phone, of all things.

It was from a number I didn't recognize and I almost didn't answer it. But I am retarded and bored so I answered.

It was some pleasant sounding woman saying she was calling from a publisher company in Ohio. She said I had entered a contest to win 25k, a trip to Australia, a new car and a room remodeled in my home. Just for entering I would be receiving 4 magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Elle, Glamour and Rachel Ray, for 48 months for free. They only wanted to verify my address. TO which she did and then asked how the weather was in NJ. I said fine and she said looks like spring is here. Then she said that they like to get information about magazine readers and she had a few questions to ask me. Starting off with my age.

*Brakes squeel*

I stopped her here and said listen I am at work right now and I really can't sit on the phone and go through a list of questions with you. She said would after work hours be better? I said well do I really need to answer your questions? And she got snotty with me and with a "of course you do" tone she said Yes.
I said well then no thank you. And hung up.

The only thing I remember filling out that had a chance to win a trip to Australia was at that damn bridal show my mom made me go to.

I have since looked up the phone number and found stories from other people who got a call from the same number. A lot of these people were women who had filled out something at David's Bridal and who ordered the Bender Ball video.

For future reference if you get a call from 216-456-8038, don't answer it.

Phone solicitor assholes!

Decomposition...

Ok so we had the mice thing. They ate poison. Now my house smells like dead mice.

I envision my vents with smell lines waving out of them.

It's supposed to be warm this weekend, so we will probably have the windows open and hopefully that will help.

I also put glasses with peppermint oil soaked cotton balls in the areas where we caught the mice, so I am hoping that works too.

Not much we can do, cause I am not going to go around punching holes into the walls and ceilings to find the mice that met their demise.

WTW?!

why did the death of martha stewart's dog make the news?

I mean it's on the MSNBC main page. Is this really news for the masses?

We're Infested

I have been sitting here for days on end thinking I had nothing to blog about. Then I realized that I forgot to tell the story about our mouse infestation. Warning to super animal lovers, this involves the death of the critters.

First off, some of you may or may not know, that we live in an 80 year old house. Plaster walls a little drafty and all that jazz. You also know that we had our garage torn down and rebuilt, that's old news.

Well it seems that around the time of the tearing down, we got a few mice in the house. We figured it was from the destruction of the garage because we saw mice scurrying out of it when it came down. The monkey had seen one scurry under the oven once or twice, so I got some mouse traps that are supposed to be all nice and easy. They mice are supposed to go inside this round plastic thing and the trap closes on them trapping them inside, so you don't have to see them and you just throw the whole thing out.

Well these traps suck and I think the mice thought so too and would dance around them in joy and mocking.

We didn't see any mice, so we figured from lack of food that they had gone. Until about a month ago. The monkey was going nuts around the floor cabinet by her food bowl. She was scratching and crying and sniffing like a lunatic. So I decided to investigate.

I pulled the drawer out and I found a whole bunch of junk underneath. Old papers and towels and trash from the previous owner. And within all that lovely stuff was mouse shit. I groaned. I pulled everything out and cleaned up the whole area, meanwhile the dog is still going out of her mind. Then I decided to investigate the other drawers. In each and every drawer was mouse shit. In the towel drawer in one of the towels was mouse shit and dog food. The little fuckers were taking the dog food and hiding in the drawers to eat it. In the bottom drawer I found that they were storing the dog food in the trash bag box, so they didn't have to expose themselves to get a snack.

This pissed me off and I decided it was war.

I went out and got the old fashioned spring loaded traps. And I preceded to put them under every drawer and behind the water cooler by the monkey's bowl. And then I waited.

By the evening I had caught 2.

That night the monkey was crying and sniffing by the vent in our bedroom. I thought great now they are upstairs, where there is NO food at all. But we had an advantage, our upstairs bathroom tub has an access door in the stairwell. So I opened that up and from there you can see all the ceiling beams and I thought maybe they were traveling across the ceiling and up and down the pipes to the basement. So I put a trap in there. Within 5 minutes we had another one and the dog was going nuts again.

So I set all the traps again and tried to go to bed.

A few nights later, we heard a trap go off and then a scraping clunking noise as it crawled across the ceiling. We think maybe it's tail or a foot just got caught and it was making an attempt to get away. That was creepy.

We also somehow lost 3 traps. We put them in the access hole and when we went to check on them, they were gone. I was beginning to think that they were plotting against us and learning how to make a trap and turn it on us. However, within 2 weeks we had killed 12 mice. And added to our onslaught by putting out 4 boxes of poison, 2 of which were completely eaten. Who knows how many died from it. It had been a week since we caught any, so I checked the access behind the tub yesterday and there was another dead one! That brings our count to at least 13 and who knows if they are gone.

Since the weather is getting better, I think we are going to go around the basement and outside and see if there are any spaces that need to be filled to keep them from getting in. Cause it's just getting gross now.

New Candy

I was browsing the candy section of my neighborhood Walgreens, when I saw NEW CANDY.

I will basically try any candy that says new or limited edition on the wrapper.

This time it was M&Ms. They now have limited edition Wild Cherry M&M's and Indiana Jones Mint Crunch M&M's! The cherry one's aren't that bad. They are medium sized too and bigger is always better when it comes to chocolate. The Mint Crunch ones are like little Thin Mints (Yes the girl scout cookie). They have a cookie like center and the minty flavor. I think I love them.

Sigh

Nothing exciting happened this weekend.

I went to Old Navy with my mom for clothes. Ending up buying $358 worth. But had $190 in gift cards.
And then my mom paid for the remainder! Totally unexpected...I should try milking this getting married thing a little more.

The man worked from Thursday 10pm until 8am Saturday, straight. Yes people 32 hours in a row. I don't think he slept, but he did get the opportunity to shower and change clothes. The shitty thing is that he barked his shin on some stage truss in the first hour of the job. So he ended up walking on it for the other 30 hours. It was really swollen and hurt bad. We think it's infected now, cellulitis, cause it's all red and hot. He has been taking old antibiotics and it seems to be going away. Good thing because he could barely walk on it when he got home. I think I will make him go to the doctor if it's still red by tomorrow.

I had a makeup test for the wedding yesterday. It was a little odd, because I don't usually wear a lot of makeup, I am not very girlie. But I had to go lightly on everything because I hate having that caked makeup look. Plus it's a wedding, so I don't need to look like a hooker.

After that fun time, the man and I went for a motorcycle ride because the weather was nice. Weee!

bad blogger

I know there are only like 2 or 3 or you that check on my little section of the innerwebs, but I am sorry for being a bad blogger.

It's just that nothing remotely interesting has been going on. So I have had no desire to write anything down.
And I don't even want to bore myself by writing down wedding shit.

Work has been no stop busy until a few days ago, so I haven't been able to goof off and write.

My bridal shower was this past weekend. Not really a surprise, I suspected it had to be coming up.
I am not girly by any means, so the whole shower experience isn't exactly my thing. And being the center of attention makes me completely uncomfortable. My future sisters-in-law were completely excited and my mom was crazy excited too. Not exactly sure why cause my mom usually isn't like that. There were like 40 people there and I ended up with 3 car loads worth of stuff, so it ain't all bad.

Oh and yesterday we had a tasting at the venue for the wedding. Food yummy, cake des-lish.

That has been the extent of the last month or so. Ain't I exciting?