Revenge of the Rats

The rats are dead and gone, but not forgotten.  They have left their marks, even from the grave.  Not only does my garage still reek, but they got into many things that I would not have expected, like the plastic water tubing for the ice-maker in the fridge.

When we pulled the reefer out of the garage to install it in its new home, we saw that the rats had chewed through much of the exposed plastic tubing that feeds the chilled water and the ice-maker.  The lumber yard had many of the fittings and tubing to effect the repairs, so it seemed like a minor inconvenience.

“Seemed” is the operative word.  Although we didn’t see any damaged tubing, there must be some, because when we turned on the water to the reefer, water started pouring out of the bottom.  We found a new section of damaged tubing, but even after we repaired that, the water was dripping out.

So I’m going to have to call for service.  That will be fun, explaining that the rats ate my tubing.

Also, I found another dead rat in the garage.  This was was long dead from the time of the poison.  Hopefully the garage smell will return to normal.

Working on the countertops

The main focus of the President’s Day long weekend is to get the countertops in so that the kitchen is serviceable in time for Chelsea Nawai’s baby shower on Saturday, 2/20/10.

We are using 24" granite tiles for the countertops.  We are bullnosing the edges of these tiles.  I bought a wet /dry tool for grinding and polishing the edges of the granite.  As an accessory to the polisher, I bought a shop vac vacuum attachment that was supposed to suck up all the water and granite dust.  It did not do a very good job, so Pop decided not to use it.  This made for a very wet working environment.  So Pop got out a big leather raincoat and he work his fireman’s turnout pants and heavy leather boots.  He was still soaked through and through.

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The grinder itself did a shockingly good job at making beautiful bullnose.  Shockingly because although the power cord had a huge GFCI built into it, my dad said that he got shocked each time he turned the device on or off.  And, as the day progressed, the shocks got worse.

He was definitely glad to be done with that job.

Tooth be gone

Lucy has naturally lost her first tooth.  She had been wiggling the loose tooth for many weeks.  On Sunday, her lips were chapped and she had a small split.  When she pulled her lip to show me the split, the loose tooth just fell over.  I reached up and squeezed it, and it popped out so easily that Lucy didn’t even notice it was gone.  When I showed her the tooth in my hand she was so amazed she started crying (surprise, surprise).

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