On Wednesday we tried to find out how much money we could spend by bringing people to our house. First we called someone to take a look in our attic and find out what was doing all the scratching. He did his inspection and found two entrances in the roof. He suspected that it could be one of three creatures: a raccoon, a rat, or a squirrel. He put traps on the roof at each of the entrances and then put some rat traps in the attic. He’s going to come back next week to check it out. That night we heard the creature in the attic again, but that was the last time. We haven’t heard it again, but the traps are still empty…

That night was also the first night it had gotten cold enough to put on the heater, but guess what. It didn’t come on. So, after I messed around with it for a while, we decided to go ahead and call some else out for that. They came out that day and found a blown fuse and a control box which was burned out. He said that the control box had been burned out for quite some time, so he didn’t even know how the air condition unit was even operating. So we got that all fixed up and in total spent $650 split almost equally between the wildlife guy and the heater guy. Isn’t home ownership wonderful? There’s nothing like unwanted, unaccounted for expenses to brighten up your day.

Today we met our new neighbors. They moved in today to discover that our former neighbor had left his house a complete mess. We predicted this and felt sorry for them. Good news for us: they have two chidren, a 4-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. The kids will be arriving tomorrow and I’m sure Abby and Emily will be ready to greet new friends.