E.T.'s L.J. U.R.L.

We closed on the house* today, it's officially ours. Yay! (And, eeeek!)

Now we have to start making repairs and such, not to mention getting our condo on the market and praying that somebody falls in love with it soon... and working on packing, moving, etc. It's going to be an intense few months but G-d willing once the dust settles it should be really nice...


* For those of you who don't already know, it's in Malden. :-)

We're losing power in less than 10 minutes! Aiiieeee! I need more time...
("Routine maintenance" is so inconvenient...)

They've finally fixed the boiler! Yaaaaaay! I was getting so tired of washing dishes in cold water...

Finally got everything put back in the kitchen cabinet! Yay! It took longer than I would have liked because when I started putting stuff back in, I realized that a couple shims got misplaced during the repair work, so if I loaded the cabinet it would fall over. Not good. I didn't have a chance to buy more shims until Friday, and we weren't around this weekend * , so tonight was my first chance. It's so nice to not have bags on the floor...

...for a couple days at least, then I have to clear our stuff out of the back hall because it's being painted. (sigh) It's always something...

* This weekend we spent a lovely Shabbos with introverte and 530nm330hz, during which we attended a Bar Mitzvah we were invited to... and Saturday night was the associated party. Sunday was work, Sunday night we had dinner with a friend (crossing paths briefly with gnomi and mabfan), then I had to catch up on bills and such. So I hadn't had time to reorganize the cabinet.

I know you're all thrilled by the ongoing saga, so...

The plumber fixed the new leak, and replaced a couple other old rusty valves while he was in there. But when he finished, the maintenance guy called me and said he thought it was too late in the day (2 p.m.) to start tearing the walls apart. And they're not working Monday (Columbus Day)... so they're going to come back Tuesday and start the actual repair work. (Not sure yet whether it'll take 1 day or 2.)

So that'll be a week and a half of dodging around the stuff we emptied out of the cabinet... urgh. It's a little annoying that it keeps getting pushed off, but I know that it's necessary; it doesn't make sense to box it in if it might start leaking again.

However, we did get something positive out of this. Our kitchen faucet has been sputtering lately. We figured it was probably a washer, but sdavido hasn't had a chance to go to the hardware store and get one. Well, I realized after I got to work this morning that there was a plumber in our kitchen! So I called the maintenance guy and asked him if the plumber could look at the sink, as long as it wouldn't take him away from what he needed to do. I figured it would be a minute's work for him to change the washer, and then we'd have a working sink again. (It's been really annoying.) Well, when I spoke to him in the afternoon, he said it turned out to be the whole - um - whatever the bottom part of the faucet is called, but the plumber had a spare so they fixed it. Yahoo! It's soooo nice to have a steady stream of water again... makes me more equanimous about waiting a few more days for them to fix the walls.

Not sure how much you all remember, but, several months ago there was a major water leak from one of the units upstairs. ( Read more... )

As some of you may remember, we've had indications that we have a mouse in residence. ( Cut for possible icky bit )

Scheherazade has a habit of "pointing" when something catches her interest; she'll stare fixedly at a given spot. When we see her doing that, it usually means that she's tracking a bug, and we'll go over and kill it. (She won't actually kill the bug, but she's capable of following an ant around in fascination for quite a while.) For periods over the past couple days, she's been staring fixedly at a shelving unit in our kitchen. I've taken everything off the relevant shelf (lower right), and tried looking behind it, but haven't seen anything. Well, tonight, she went into full Sphynx mode in front of it, and looked prepared to stay there for a while. This was highly unusual, so I took everything off the shelf again... and discovered that something's been eating our crackers. Huh! Apparently we might have a little furry visitor hiding back there somewhere. I'm going to call the exterminator in the morning, of course, but amusingly, as soon as she saw us focusing on that spot, she wandered away and sat in the hallway looking smug. I thanked her for being a good predator. We'd rather not have a mouse, of course... but I'm very glad that we do have an alert cat on patrol, as otherwise we might not have noticed anything.