Blah, blah, blah, bullet points...blah, blah, blah.

• I can't even begin to properly and fully describe the amount of dust which has been generated thanks to the re-do of our sodding shower. Not only in the bathroom (which was to be expected) but into our bedroom (I have made the bed properly every working day for the past 2 weeks to keep it off our pillows), and through the bedroom into our upper hall to decorate the stair rails. It's astounding.
• They say the tile work should be done early this week. But then a plumber needs to come out and replace all of the exposed bits with new as the original bits were damaged by exposure to an acid which was supposed to do something to the original grout but only really managed to eat away at the metal in the shower, and some in the rest of the bathroom. So, when we will actually return to using the bathroom and not the one on the other side of the house? I wish I knew. I am assuming at some point before the baby arrives!
• Ordered proper blackout shades for the windows in LO's and Baby's room. Ones which have a metallic film between the layers so light will only come in around the edges, and no cords for safety's sake.  Both rooms have "blackout"curtains which have not been as room darkening as expected.  LO's room has a double width window and has gone through a blackout roller blind which was too wide to work properly and currently has temporary paper blackout shades which do work well but also do not go up and down easily. Both of which were/are frustrating as sometimes it would be quite helpful to have light actually come into the room.  The Baby's room has been a guest room so has not had supplemental blinds to the blackout curtains but more darkening power will be necessary as it is an east facing room and I don't do early mornings (well, I know there will be some, but hopefully they won't be thanks to sunlight)! (shadesshuttersblinds.com have been awesome on both products and pricing - we also got the motorized solar shades for our breakfast area and family room from there)
• Did I mention we put up room darkening roman shades in our room to hide behind our curtains (remade from the bedroom curtains at the old house and never as room darkening as envisioned) a while back? Those replaced temporary paper blackout shades which had been up for long enough that the black part of the paper, facing into the room, had faded almost entirely. (Here I went with el-cheapo non-custom roman shades from JCPenney since they will not get much, if any, movement. They work great, but stank up the room for the first few weeks.)
• Once the shower of doom (TM) is finally completed I'm going to start LO back up on swim lessons. We spent less than an hour in the pool yesterday and 75% of the time DH and I were trying to get her to swim properly - not even the promise of getting to jump off the diving board if she made it across the pool (which I know she can totally do since she was able to swim that distance at a lesson) made a difference - it's just no fun to be in the pool with her since she's confident enough to get herself into but not skilled enough to get herself out of potentially hazardous situations.
• Grocery store run today included: 3 boxes of ice cream sandwiches, 1 tub of ice cream, & half a dozen yogurts (plus other things). Cashier didn't bother to ask if I wanted paper or plastic & then huffed when I asked for paper after she had started filling plastic so I ended up with plastic in paper. Gee, thanks, I really appreciate having yet more plastic bags around to have to figure out how to recycle. And damp ones from the sweating of the cold items in the humid summer air, at that.
• Now DH wants me to go look at the spacing on some of the tiles installed today. He's not happy...and I'm at the point where all I want to do is shout "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care!" (courtesy of John Cusack in "America's Sweethearts") and let it be d-o-n-e DONE. 

Also, RIP Robin Williams.  And sadness for Aly of breathegently whose fears were realized instead of allayed. Holding them in my heart tonight.

Not Playing Dead

That's what the possum in our garage last week wasn't doing when my mother and I drove in after playing Bunco Wednesday night. What it was doing was clinging to the top of the lower sash of the double-hung window in front of my garage bay.

For the record: possums smell. And if you accidentally leave your garage door open at night they might very well take it as an invitation to make themselves at home.

It's not like we live in the middle of nowhere. We live in a very nice neighborhood, but one which still has a lot of undisturbed forest in common areas and unbuilt lots. (The developer didn't clear-cut the community which so many do.) Thus we have a fair amount of wild animals - a herd of deer regularly pass through our back yard, we've seen a fox every now and then, and lizards and skinks love our retaining walls for sunning and housing.

But this is the first time the wildlife has gotten quite so upclose and personal. Thank goodness the neighborhood security force is prepared and able to deal with such things. Mr. (or Mrs., who knows?!) Possum was safely apprehended and relocated and will hopefully never be seen again, at least in our garage.

Cough, Hack, Snort, Sneeze, Wheeze

Those are the noises I've been making for the past few days.

Yes, gentle readers, I have been unlucky enough to find myself in possession of a full-grown cold. I suspect it was shared with me by my bosses wife. Though, I guess I should be lucky to be the last in line to come down with something - boss had bronchitis, bosses wife had cold that moved into bronchitis, and my co-worker (who I don't see much as he mostly works in outside the office) is also suffering from some sort of respiratory illness requiring medical intervention.

We're a fun group to be around!

(I'm just glad and knocking on wood 'til my knuckles are raw that I haven't been struck by the stomach flu that's going around the area. I need to throw up more like I need, well, you get the picture.)

Hope all of you are managing to stay well and healthy out there!

::Shudder::

I found mouse droppings near our kitchen sink and in the cabinet below when I investigated further.

My guess? These are remnants from the same critter which apparently hitched a ride in the dog's bag (Yes, she has a bag we use for travel. It's a monogrammed zip-top LL Bean tote I used once to take food to a kennel where we were boarding her, and the kennel wrote her name on it in permanent marker. I'm not bitter much about that. We've since stopped taking her to that kennel, but for other reasons.) from the in-laws house at Christmas.

Thank goodness for bleach!

Of course it would be too much to ask for the cats to earn their weight around here by catching said mouse. Instead they seem to find their way to the empty fishtanks in the basement and die a slow painful death of dehydration and starvation. Funky.