![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the sheep look up
Nov. 25th, 2014 03:06 pmIs it normal for a microwave to heat up on outside? The one I use at work is a cheap crap one that takes forever to do anything, so people tend to run it for 20 minutes at a time to try and get their lunch heated all the way through. When I touch the top surface it's hot, not just warm. I'm worried it's going to blow up in my face one of these days.
*****************************
Poor Zachary tested negative for any kind of infections so for the moment we're instructed to treat him with special food, pro-biotics and some additional medication for the diarrhea. He hates being dosed and fights it as much as possible without actually using his claws. Axel thinks it's starting to work, I'm less sure. In the meantime, we clean up puddles of liquid poop every day. He's banned from the bedrooms until we get this cleared up.
I still can't figure out why his owners wouldn't want to keep him. He is a seriously lovely cat. We have a chair for him between our desks so we can both pet him while we're on the computer, and he just sits there and purrs the entire time we're home.
*****************************
The biggest issue we are dealing with in the house right now is that our front steps - as I predicted last fall - didn't make it through the winter intact. They're kind of patched for the present but the bannister isn't really supported by anything and I expect another freeze-thaw cycle to take them right out. We've been trying to get a quote on fixing it since July with no luck.
Back when we bought this place - 11 years ago? Holy Shit - we could have bought a bachelor condo for the same price. I remember saying that the prices would have to drop soon with the sheer number of new buildings going up. Ha ha. Wrongo. People keep moving into the city and so new condos keep going up in old churches, demolished factory sites and scraps of vacant land. (Meanwhile we keep voting in people who won't spend money on public transit. So it's getting a little sweaty in here.)
It's a brilliant time to be in the trades. Anybody who can do anything related to building is off working in new construction. The down side to this is that it's next to impossible to get a contractor to take on a smaller job. Ergo, nobody answering our calls on how many kidneys they want to replace our front steps. It's not a catastrophe if they get to the point where we can't use them - we have an entrance into the basement. We'd just have to block them off so we don't inadvertently kill off our postman or something and just sit tight until the housing market slows down.
The part that concerns me is that we have gotten nasty-grams from the city about renovation materials sitting on our front lawn for longer than they were happy with, so it's not impossible that an inspector could drive by in the spring, see the damage and slap a work order on us. My experience with the city is that they tend to be pretty reasonable - when we first bought Roxton Manor in the late 90's we got a notice from the city that there were a bunch of outstanding work orders on the property. (The lawyer should have caught that, but that's another story.) One of the orders was, coincidentally, to get handrails put on the exterior steps. They were fine with extending the deadline when we called them and told them we were the new owners and we needed a bit more time to get to it. But what do they do in a situation where you genuinely can't find anybody who will do the work? I suppose I could show them dates when we first started requesting quotes.
*****************************
In the meantime, I am still without a phone. It's now been a week and it hasn't turned up at the Lost & Found, so I guess it's time to just shell out for a new one.
Poor Zachary tested negative for any kind of infections so for the moment we're instructed to treat him with special food, pro-biotics and some additional medication for the diarrhea. He hates being dosed and fights it as much as possible without actually using his claws. Axel thinks it's starting to work, I'm less sure. In the meantime, we clean up puddles of liquid poop every day. He's banned from the bedrooms until we get this cleared up.
I still can't figure out why his owners wouldn't want to keep him. He is a seriously lovely cat. We have a chair for him between our desks so we can both pet him while we're on the computer, and he just sits there and purrs the entire time we're home.
The biggest issue we are dealing with in the house right now is that our front steps - as I predicted last fall - didn't make it through the winter intact. They're kind of patched for the present but the bannister isn't really supported by anything and I expect another freeze-thaw cycle to take them right out. We've been trying to get a quote on fixing it since July with no luck.
Back when we bought this place - 11 years ago? Holy Shit - we could have bought a bachelor condo for the same price. I remember saying that the prices would have to drop soon with the sheer number of new buildings going up. Ha ha. Wrongo. People keep moving into the city and so new condos keep going up in old churches, demolished factory sites and scraps of vacant land. (Meanwhile we keep voting in people who won't spend money on public transit. So it's getting a little sweaty in here.)
It's a brilliant time to be in the trades. Anybody who can do anything related to building is off working in new construction. The down side to this is that it's next to impossible to get a contractor to take on a smaller job. Ergo, nobody answering our calls on how many kidneys they want to replace our front steps. It's not a catastrophe if they get to the point where we can't use them - we have an entrance into the basement. We'd just have to block them off so we don't inadvertently kill off our postman or something and just sit tight until the housing market slows down.
The part that concerns me is that we have gotten nasty-grams from the city about renovation materials sitting on our front lawn for longer than they were happy with, so it's not impossible that an inspector could drive by in the spring, see the damage and slap a work order on us. My experience with the city is that they tend to be pretty reasonable - when we first bought Roxton Manor in the late 90's we got a notice from the city that there were a bunch of outstanding work orders on the property. (The lawyer should have caught that, but that's another story.) One of the orders was, coincidentally, to get handrails put on the exterior steps. They were fine with extending the deadline when we called them and told them we were the new owners and we needed a bit more time to get to it. But what do they do in a situation where you genuinely can't find anybody who will do the work? I suppose I could show them dates when we first started requesting quotes.
In the meantime, I am still without a phone. It's now been a week and it hasn't turned up at the Lost & Found, so I guess it's time to just shell out for a new one.