Yes, I’m still very much alive.\u00a0 Hubby and I have been working on all kinds of things here at the house.\u00a0 He left this morning to head back to San Antonio, where he’ll spend the week loading the car trailer with more auto parts.<\/p>\n
Last week, we moved the ’46 4-door into position in the storage garage and unloaded the Spitfire.\u00a0 We also did a little clean-up in the storage garage and cleaned the gutters (which had, amazingly, filled up with leaves over the winter).\u00a0 We found some gutter guards at Lowe’s and bought one to see if it would work.\u00a0 It will, so I’ll be looking for more this week.<\/p>\n
We replaced the first floor heating and A\/C unit with a heat pump.\u00a0 I’d forgotten that those things run all. the. time.\u00a0 Installation is nearly complete, but the guys got it working in time for the weekend so we’d have heat.\u00a0 Since last week was cold and rainy, that was really appreciated.<\/p>\n
Oh, yes.\u00a0 Our friend in the walls.\u00a0 I don’t think I’d mentioned him.\u00a0 Something was scratching behind the wall in the bedroom.\u00a0 There was a repair on the wall where the previous owners told us a squirrel had come through.\u00a0 That was where I isolated the gnawing to.\u00a0 Hubby and I figured we had something between a mouse and a squirrel in size trying to come through the patch.\u00a0 A couple of days ago, hubby called me upstairs and showed me where it had broken through.\u00a0 Just a small hole.\u00a0 It temporarily gave me the creeps, of course.\u00a0 Hubby peeked up and saw fur and an eye looking back at him.\u00a0 From that, he determined it was either a squirrel or a rat.\u00a0 Based upon activity times (active at night and quiet during the day), he surmised it’s a rat.<\/p>\n
For starters, we poked moth balls into the hole Saturday afternoon.\u00a0 The critter scurried away, and I haven’t heard from him since.\u00a0 We patched the patch with more expandable foam.\u00a0 Then we went into the attic looking for signs of rat.\u00a0 None.\u00a0 But we looked down beside the chimney and noticed an old metal stovepipe extending from the chimney to the bedroom wall.\u00a0 We figure he came down the chimney and into that pipe, so he’s not likely to get into the house.\u00a0 Something in the chimney must be keeping him from coming all the way down, or he’d have found his way into the front bedroom easily enough.\u00a0 We’ll be investigating that over the next few weeks.\u00a0 We don’t really want the critter getting loose in the house even if it might make the cats’ day.<\/p>\n
And, finally, I head to the local Texas Veterans’ Commission office tomorrow to begin what I expect will be an arduous process to file my claim for veterans compensation.<\/p>\n
As for writing, I’m still on Scene 18.\u00a0 It’s a scene I’m inserting, so it’s all new material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, I’m still very much alive.\u00a0 Hubby and I have been working on all kinds of things here at the house.\u00a0 He left this morning to head back to San Antonio, where he’ll spend the week loading the car trailer with more auto parts. Last week, we moved the ’46 …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,11,82,5,49],"tags":[145,122,144,146],"class_list":["post-1693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1946-mercury","category-health","category-non-writing","category-property","category-twilight","tag-4door","tag-central-tx-house","tag-spitfire","tag-va"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}