Driers and Mice etc.

No, mice are not in the drier, thank goodness. But last weekend after a rep from our gas company, who was out to swap some piece of our meter, confirmed that our brand new drier was indeed spewing un-combusted natural gas out of its vent and onto our front walk, I called the company I bought the drier from. My sales person was unavailable. The service department assured me they had no one working over the weekend. Then he stopped talking. I tersely told him my expectation was that he would get a technician out to my house as soon as humanly possible. Please do you damn job. He followed instructions. The tech ran the drier on a setting that should have just had it blowing air. Not hot air, but air. Not only did the drier spew gas, but it caught on fire down in it’s guts. The tech was very impressed and ‘red-tagged’ the drier. It’s repairable, but we are without a drier for 2-weeks. We have a fire going in the stove, and damp clothes draped about. My son-in-law assured me we could use their drier, and we might, but as long as I don’t do a load of sheets, or other large unwieldy items, I think we’ll manage.

There is a small closet in our studio, created years ago when we turned my office into the house’s legal 5th bedroom. The insulation job was sketchy. I asked my DH if we could redo the insulation and actually finish off the slanted ceiling with some pieces of plywood we have sitting around. Saturday we decided to take a look and first steps. We were greeted with mouse poop. The weather is turning and mice are looking for somewhere warmer and drier than the outdoors. The studio addition to the house is complicated, and we’ve never, in almost 22-years, been able to completely mouse proof its interfaces. Thankfully we have zero evidence (poop) of mice in the house. It’s time to get serious about buttoning up the nooks and crannies the previous owner left open.

We took all of the bins of fabric out the the closet on Saturday. I disinfected each bin and made sure the mice hadn’t found their way into the bins. They hadn’t. All the shelves came out. It’s a wee empty space now, ready for rehab. I left out two sticky traps last night, and this morning a mouse was inhabiting one of them. This was informative as to where it got in as there were poops on the back wall blocking. It must have entered from above.

I deployed steel wool in every crevasse today. We took measurements for blocking on one wall, and have a plan. Next anti-mouse area is the atrium, then the attic.

In other first-world problem news, my 17-year old car’s convertible top is busted yet again. At least it’s closed now, but dripping hydraulic fluid on me when I drive it… I have to find out what the (insane) cost would be to rebuild the entire system all at once rather than bit by bit. I really love this car. It’s fast, pretty, mechanically competent, and has, for its age, very low miles.

And then there’s trying to schedule the trip to San Francisco to scatter my parent’s ashes. Originally I was going to leave this Tuesday. My sailboat captain only just made contact with me last week, 2-weeks after a mutual friend introduced us. We’ll connect this week to make plans. I usually have the bulkheads of my life planned months in advance. Last minute-ing a trip like this ratchets up my anxiety. There is a limited window to sail to the Farallon’s each year. Four weeks left. I’ll pack a couple of rolls of paper towels to dab at the drip of hydraulic fluid as I drive to SF. 😏