Mice

We’ve known there were mice in the garage since we moved in. However, up until last night we had never seen one in the house.

While making dinner last night, I grabbed the garbage can under the kitchen sink only to discover mice peeking out of it. Tiny heads. Beady eyes. I put the can down on the deck outside while one of the little buggers crawled out and hid at the base of the cabinets and tried to get our cat, Dexter, to take care of the situation, but our dog Lucy would not allow it and instead thwarted my efforts to eliminate the problem quickly. In the meantime, at least one mouse escaped my sight; the other either ran off into the backyard or ended up in the trash can outside. I spotted the area under the sink where they were coming through, a quarter sized hole adjacent to the plumbing into the wall, and as a temporary fix plugged it with some plastic grocery bags.

Later that night as my husband is checking random areas a mouse could hide, his first check, in the cabinet under the aquarium, reveals the rodent in all his miniscule grotesqueness. This time the dog was locked in a room so the cat could prowl and stalk his prey. Half an hour later, and with the kitchen in disarray, the mouse was dead with the smashing of a shoe. My shoe. From my hand. Before we could sweep the mouse up and fling it into the forest behind the house, the cat quickly grabbed the mouse and scurried off into the living room where we had to try and get it out of his mouth. I’m happy to report some forest critter probably had a lovely meal, but we’re both a bit creeped out about any mice I may not have seen that might still be roaming freely.

Lacking

My original plan for this blog was to include all sorts of homemaking tips and tricks I employ or learn. The last few months have been a little lacking.

In case you haven’t noticed, my blog hasn’t been so much about homemaking lately. I suppose moving into a house under less than ideal circumstances has, well, pretty much left a rather large sty in that area. I know a big part of it is that I don’t want to put too much work into a house that isn’t ours. At the same time, however, maybe the lack of any personal pictures on the walls is preventing me from calling this house a home. Or the fact that any day we could decide to pack up and move again.

Why should any of these things prevent me from developing new recipes or figuring out better ways to clean something or cheap ways to fix an issue? The real answer is that they shouldn’t. In fact I should be in full developmental mode just to keep my mind off of the fact that due to circumstances I cannot change, we are no longer homeowners (well, technically until they auction off the damn house we are) but renters. Yes, dealing with a landlord who doesn’t really know how to be one can get annoying, but at the same time he did rent the house to us in full faith that we’d take care of it while living here. I guess it is time to live up to our end of the bargain… and to finally mop the floors.

Huh...

So yesterday morning we went over to look at a prospective house. Let’s just say first impressions can leave a bad taste in your mouth… literally.

Okay, so the layout is almost exactly like my sister’s house except this one has a vaulted ceiling and bay window in the living room. The downside to this is the super small rooms, especially master bedroom. I don’t even know if we can physically fit our queen size bed into it, let alone the dresser. I somehow think my partner thought moving into a newer house would mean more open living spaces with bigger bedrooms. Sadly that is not the case with this place and his disappointment was apparent. The upside is the double car garage for lots of storage!

But here is the thing we have to keep in mind, it is temporary. While I think we were looking for a place to stay in for a couple years, the fact of the matter is that it may only be a year depending on a multitude of factors, the major one being that the landlord may decide to move back in. Hence why we told him we’d like a contract for a one year lease and month to month after that. He was fairly receptive to the idea and had already planned on getting the legal paperwork since we would be his first real tenants outside of the friends who were currently living there.

Let me tell you what. It is difficult to imagine living someplace when there is so much other people’s stuff in a house. And I’m sorry, but is it necessary to make an entire wall in the living room, and not just any wall but the vaulted ceiling portion that goes up fourteen feet high by twelve feet wide of nothing but Nascar posters and memorabilia and Dale Earnhardt (not Jr.) all over it? And baby-shit orange paint in the kitchen? Really? What the hell? Thank God we can paint. My concern is the ass-nasty carpet. At least my sister’s house has laminate flooring throughout, but this carpet is grungy and gross and has holes and missing sections. And also, he pointed out and we couldn’t help but notice, his ex-wife and stepson apparently had a violent streak and took it out on the doors. As in holes punched into a few of them. What the hell? Grrr...

Okay, so now that all that is off my chest, here’s the deal. We’re going to see if we can take part of our first and last month rents and replace the carpet and broken doors. If he is not up to that then we will simply have to make do with cleaning the carpet and figuring something else out for the doors, which may mean replacing them out of pocket while we’re living there. And hey, it’s only temporary… and we get to keep the chickens.