Hoooo, Boy.

Lets get the pictures of the progeny out of the way first this time.

He already likes making music - sometimes I can't even play my G-Box because he won't leave it alone.

I apologize for the blurriness in some of these photos. We'll just agree that it's my fault that the camera does this now and move on. I think either the battery is getting old, or I've upset the camera trying to take lower resolution pictures so I can use less Flickr space each month.

The title of this piece: Baby beats the hell out of another boy who has a colander for a head.

Looks like Harold from Harold and the Purple Crayon, eh?

What I did this weekend: Enjoyed life with a shop - i.e. built some shelves, reattached training wheels, made a chicken wire compost pit (Berkeley method, duh...), searched out water damage...Water damage...Yeah.

Saturday we had a pretty good rain - I knew we had a leak somewhere, now I've found it. Sort of. There's a drip in the shop, and sometimes another in Ethan's room. Although we were told the drip in Ethan's room was caused by an ice dam, and so was seasonal and needed to be taken care of, but not urgently so. WhaHuh. These two drips share the same wall, woops. I went down in the basement for some reason and found standing water, lots of standing water (we had been told that the basement was dry year round). It seemed to be coming in through the door jam that shares the same wall in question...

H20 was coming out of this corner like a miniature freakin' river!
This wall is where the shop was added on to the house. Here's the wall in question, where it joins directly to the house. Notice the wood siding that can still be seen on one wall (this wall is where the kitchen door is).

The silver thing is the dryer vent...Brilliant...More on that later...Maybe.
The insulation on the right hand side has obviously seen some moisture, and the crack in the corner is full of mildew.

I'll try to explain...
This is the back of the wall in the last picture. Off of the dining room, a small laundry/refrigerator room was also added. This floor needed to be higher than the shop floor, for the obvious reason of being on level with the rest of the downstairs floor. So out in the shop, it juts out and has a small crawl space underneath. I tore off the board on the backside of the wall in question, and the board that's underneath the floor under the washer/dryer. Water had saturated the wood, and obviously had been pooling there for a while - wood was swollen, insulation was rotted and poured out in a sludge like fashion. Boo! Maybe the H20 is coming from the plumbing here, but I doubt it.

We want to move the washer and dryer out into the shop. It would be more convenient, and get rid of that retarded long dryer vent. Honestly, who thought that up? It's too long on it's own - but they also made it about five feet longer than it needed to be, so water pools in it, clothes don't get dried, Argh!

I'm a little leary of poking around anymore myself, what with the haphazard wiring that's everywhere, and that I've done all the poking I know how to do, and seen no source for the leak. No soft spots/rot on the lower roof - even where it joins the shop to the house, none in the attic. I can't get up on the upper roof, as I have no ladder, and no wish to fall to my death. So I guess I'm going to have to call someone. Ouch. Any ideas, anyone?

And finally, the last mouse I caught was no mouse at all, but a shrew. I have no problem with shrews. As far as I know they stay away from people food, eat bugs, aren't known for their disease carrying abilities, and are the only venomous mammal. They're ugly, sure, but they eat bugs, and that's cool with me. And the cannibalizing bastards that I do have a problem with left the poor shrew's carcass alone - they must respect the shrew too.