This ‘n That

My coworkers took Jose and me out to a baby shower lunch today at BJ’s and we got pizookies for dessert. I am SO FULL and sleepy now. Mmm pizookies.

Finally hung the flagpole my parents got us last year; sunny skies; baby dresser in the back of Jason’s truck

After all of the rain last week, the sun and heat returned and things are starting to dry out. But we’ve noticed an interesting side effect of the deluge — there are many varieties of critters making their way into our house. At first, there were ants around the stove. This was annoying, but I figured we just needed to do a better job of cleaning up the crumbs and bits of food that inevitably end up on the counters when we cook. But then we noticed that our master closet, which is somewhat in the middle of the house and doesn’t border any exterior walls, seemed to be a portal to the outside somehow.

On Monday night, I quite literally had ants in my pants. Unfortunately I didn’t notice this until one of them bit me as I was putting on my pajama pants after work. (Let me just say that the inside of your thigh is not a pleasant place to get a fire ant bite.) Then on Wednesday morning as I was in the shower, I looked out just in time to see a small lizard come crawling out of the same closet! And last night’s visitor was a rather large spider that decided to hang out in the living room to watch TV with us. Jose took care of those ants with some Raid, I captured the lizard and took him outside, and Jose killed the spider — but I’m kind of wondering what’s next. Locusts?

Jose wanted to install a ceiling fan in the baby’s room, so we picked one up at Lowe’s last weekend. (I know, I know, HGTV is always showing designers taking DOWN ceiling fans because they aren’t stylish and whatnot, but hey, down here in Texas they are really nice to have.) Anyway, it looked easy enough, but in the end it probably took us 5-6 hours to install! Of course not all of this time was spent on the actual installation. First, we went back and forth for a while on whether the existing electrical box was strong enough to support the weight of the fan. We tried approaching it from the attic, but it was going to be a pain in the butt to get back there — there was a bunch of HVAC ducting in the way, not to mention the mounds of blown-in insulation that obscured everything.

But then Jose had a brilliant idea! Since we built our house, we were able to take tons of photos of everything as it went up — including a whole set of photos that we took right before they put up drywall over everything. We looked at the photos of the ceiling in the living room, where there is already a fan installed, and compared it to photos of the baby room. The electrical boxes were installed the exact same way, which gave us confidence that we didn’t need to change anything to make the new fan structurally sound.

The other big hiccup came when Jose tried to secure the “canopy cover” to the mount and discovered that it was basically impossible since the electrical box — and thus the top of the fan mount — was about a quarter-inch higher than the ceiling itself. So after he had already wired everything together, he had to take it back down so that we could add some shims between the mount and the electrical box to make it even with the ceiling. In the end though, we triumphed! And as a bonus, the room was already wired for a fan, meaning you can turn on both the light and the fan separately from the two wall switches. (In retrospect, we realized that was probably another sign that the wiring and structure had been done with a fan in mind from the start.)

On tap for this weekend? Watching the finale of the Tour de France, running some errands, doing some sewing, relaxing, and cleaning up the mess in the baby room so it’s ready for its soon-to-arrive occupant!