Five For Friday

Pardon for a very long Five for Friday...I should have made the last part its own post, but I couldn't think of more things for this one.

1. We had the pleasure of having the lovely Ball sisters (No relation to Erin and Dru. They are friends of ours from Fairfax.) spend a night with us on Sunday. They were on a cross-country road trip and made us one of their stops. We all hung out and ate and had a great time! 

The girls--but  this was when they were in WA...I didn't take any pics while they were here.

2. We've been having such weird weather lately. Lots of rain...I kind of have felt like we live in Washington or something. And earlier this week we had several tornadoes touch down out east of us. Here in lovely Arvada, we don't tend to get many tornado warnings, we just get the edge of the storm with lots of rain and small hail. The nice side effect of all this moisture is that it is GREEN! Colorado isn't typically very green, but right now, all the fields and the mountains are my favorite color. I can't remember the mountains ever being green before.

3. I went to the basement to do laundry yesterday and discovered that our floor drain had backed up. Once Tyler got home we spent hours snaking it and trying to fix it, to no avail. So this afternoon, we had a plumber come. The problem is fixed temporarily, but we found out that there is a crack in the very old part of our line out to the sewer and it needs to be replaced fairly soon, to prevent it collapsing. And it is going to be expensive. So, we have an opportunity to trust God to provide! Also, I never realized how much I like plumbing, until it stopped working!

This is the beginning...before it got really ugly. Let's just say by the end, the entire laundry room floor was covered in sludge!

4. & 5.  --Prepare for a story---

So after I finished up the lovely task of mopping up water and drain sludge and who knows what from all over the laundry room floor last night, I was turning on the washing machine and something caught my eye. There was a rat in the window-well. And it was looking at me with it's nasty, beady little eyes! 

Now, having grown up where I did, I have lots of bad mice/rat experiences. Like the time Jen and I woke up in the middle of the night to hear Tigger pouncing on a mouse in my pile of wedding magazines, or how rats infested the barn one year and ran across my feet when I went to collect eggs, or the time I stuck my foot in a boot and felt something warm and hairy...I still get the shivers about that one! 

Needless to say I  began to yell for Tyler and squirm and shudder and carry on and Tyler came running, probably thinking the basement was flooding again. He is nice and didn't laugh at me...I think. I was rather disturbed--it kept looking at me, plus I was pretty exhausted and emotional from all the flooding stress, AND I thought I saw a baby perhaps (turned out to be a mouse) and perhaps there was a nest and ewww! So Tyler went and got the cat and took her outside, telling her to go kill the rat. The wretched creature took one look at the window-well and ran away. (I don't think she was scared...just indifferent and wanting to annoy us.) 

So then Tyler began searching for his pellet gun. (And I began fearing for the window) He had some trouble finding it, so it took awhile. And when he went out to shoot it, he saw The Ghost Cat sitting in the yard, dead rat in its mouth. (The Ghost Cat is a wild cat that lives in our yard somewhere...we used to hear it meowing and then we could never find a cat, so we called it The Ghost Cat. It has gotten a little friendlier since.) And so Tyler shot the remaining mouse with the pellet gun.

Moral of the story--I think I need to switch cats. I have never loved a cat like I now love The Ghost Cat...it came to my rescue! Either that or it just saw the chance for a tasty meal. Also, Tompkins is dumb.  But we knew that... 

Also Tyler claims it was just a mouse, not a rat. But I must sadly disagree. Then we had a debate about who has seen more rats and mice, (me! it's me!) and then that was pretty much the story of our week. The End.