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Mouse-proofing, bra-shopping, leaf-peeping

October 19th, 2012 at 09:15 pm

We're having an all-day rain event here in Connecticut. We're at peak color now, and i hope to get over to Huntington State Park sometime this weekend with the camera. They have nice, wide trails there so ticks shouldn't be a concern.

It's a good day for reading, writing and editing, all of which I've been doing! The cats enjoyed a catnip treat today and have finally settled down for a mid-afternoon snooze. I joined them, briefly.

My income for the month of October has already exceeded expected expenses, so I am grateful.

I was at Kohl's this past week with $125 worth of gift cards from a credit card reward redemption. They only had so many choices as to stores, and this probably wouldn't be my first choice again anytime soon. I finally decided I could use some new bras, so I spent the longest time...about an hour...browsing for them and trying them on. Oprah Winfrey once famously said that most women aren't wearing the right sized bra, and I figure I was one of those, so I'm trying to be careful to get the right size. I had finally winnowed down the choices to three finalists. Then, I figured, i would choose to buy 1 or 2 based on which cost the least. Turns out that all 3 cost in the neighborhood of $21 to $23, so I just chose 2 randomly. It's quite a lot of money for a single bra.

Then, as I was leaving the bra and panty section, I saw a rack of both marked "70% off!" I soon found that if I wasn't too choosy as to color or pattern, I could find any number of bras in my size for just $12 each! Happily, I wound up with three pairs. A very good buy.

I made some chili today for lunch with ground turkey. There are enough leftovers for at least five more servings. I'm also nibbling on some organic red grapes now.

Not much else going on today. I'm on page 24 of the business ethics manuscript I'm editing. I'm well ahead of schedule and should be able to turn in the first 50 pages sometime next week. I hope he will be pleased with my work!

I don't think the social worker will go for the price I quoted her $125 ea) for conducting the interviews and writing the reports for her child custody cases. At least, that is my take on it since she hasn't responded to my proposal of this past Wednesday.

A friend of mine brough up something I hadn't considered. He said it would be unethical and fraudulent of the social worker to have me do these interviews and reports since they will most likely contain her signature, not mine. If there was ever a question about what someone said in the report or something that was claimed, she'd be unable to verify or vouch for the report since she hadn't actually conducted the interview. So I don't know. I would think she would have thought this through, as it would affect her credibility, not mine.

You'd think this would have occurred to me after 17 years of living here, but I recently had a lightbulb moment when i was researching mouseproofing one's house online and someone was writing about how mice frequently gain access by crawling behind the vinyl siding, where it meets the foundation. Bingo. It kind of made sense to me, based on how Luther waits near a certain basement window and the crevices I had in fact noticed recently under the entire front foundation.

The author's solution online was to cut strips of wire lath, bend them in half and then squeeze it in place under the bottom of the vinyl siding. Bending it in half allows it to expand somewhat to fit the gap. Sounded easy. I happened to have a sheet of lath. So I spent considerable time cutting it with some household shears and them bending it in two by banging against the sharp lath with a hammer against a workbench in my garage. It's very difficult to work with, especially with no gloves. I got a small area maybe 5 or 6 feet long done, but I was thinking, there's got to be a better way. And then I remembered that Home Depot carries steel wool, and that this would be a good use of the product and probably a heck of a lot easier to cut. So I used some gift cards to buy 2 smallish wads of the stuff there. I'll be stuffing it under the vinyl this weekend. I haven't examined underneath the vinyl all the way around the house, but this would be somewhat costly to buy if I had to do all of it. We'll see....

Hope everyone has a nice weekend.

2 Responses to “Mouse-proofing, bra-shopping, leaf-peeping”

  1. ironicone Says:
    1350678616

    To mouseproof my house, I stuffed in steel wool, then sprayed a can of the expanding foam insulation where I could. It can be very messy, but it did help a lot.

  2. patientsaver Says:
    1350679237

    I have used that expanding foam, but your'e right, it can be messy and hard to control as it pours out of the nozzle. Also, the idea with either the lath or the steel wool is that the mice can't chew through metal as they chew through practically anything else.

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