The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

I think this heading about sums up how I am feeling about my day...

The Good-

Of all of the household chores that I hate, dishes are the thing that I hate the most. For the first three years of our marriage we had a dishwasher, but then moved to Utah, where such a thing didn't exist in a rental property. In July, Caleb bought a dishwasher from someone on KSL and this weekend, he installed it for me. We had a perfect spot ready in the kitchen where the washer used to be (that's right, the laundry used to happen in the kitchen), and he was able to get it running pretty quickly. I have been quite excited. So far we have only run it twice, but I am looking forward to using it at my leisure. Hurray for great husbands everywhere! Especially mine!

The Bad-

Well, this morning while I was sweeping I noticed a weird smell coming from the corner of my dining room where I have a bench sitting next to the cold air return that leads to the basement. At first I thought Henry must have stashed some food behind the bench, but upon closer investigation I found nothing of the sort and continued on my cleaning spree. After a while I kept catching the weird smell and finally decided that it might be coming from the basement and probably was related to something that was no longer living. I decided to see for sure. When I opened the door the smell was thick, so I headed back up to the boys. Finally after being outside for a little while I thought the smell in the house was getting worse and left the boys in the neighbors yard to head down with a flashlight and check it out. The first thing I noticed was that the small mouse trap that is usually sitting in plain sight of the door wasn't there, so as I flashed the light around the corner I saw the culprit. A super huge rat, about the size of my foot. Of course, I yelled and ran out of there. Knowing that I was not tough enough to head by down there and bring the thing out, I asked my stay-at-home dad neighbor, Scott, and he was tough enough to do it for me. Even he thought the thing was really big. Last week the cable guy came to upgrade the cable and had gone down there and then left the door open, which we didn't notice until the next morning. We had a few small mice get in last winter, hence the trap that was there, but after sealing everything up and setting traps, we hadn't seen one since January. Though I had heard of these nasty things being seen in the neighborhood, I am just hoping that this is the last glimpse that I get of one. It was thoroughly disgusting. Pretty close to Princess Bride type of creature.

The Ugly-

Probably the best words to describe our new pet that seems to be living on the porch. We saw the little guy a few weeks back on the screen door and later in the flowerbed and today he returned to the porch. He is now more brown and much bigger, but still pretty cool. I am amazed that he can walk on the smooth boards of the window trim and then still make his way quickly up the glass of the window. This is the kind of animal intrusion that I prefer. Though cute fuzzy bunnies would beat all of this.