Well it was an interesting day today.
My handy guy showed up at 8:00 to work on the bathroom floor upstairs - remember a while a go when I decided to pull up the old peel 'n stick floor, got the saws all out and almost got all the old under layment up? John needed to pull the toilet, put down new under layment, lay my new peel n stick and reset the toilet.
I had to mow and wanted to get at it early since it was going to be mid 90's today. Front lawn all done right about the time the structural engineer showed up to check the crack on the porch. He poked his head in the crawl space under the porch, looked at the crack on the outside and then on the inside of the enclosed porch. Good news, he didn't see any structural damage to the foundation. He thought something happened one time to make the porch kind of shift. He told Dad and me to put flashing on the outside of the house to keep the water/rain/moisture out and then fill the crack on the inside really good, put tape over it like Mike had and we could paint the inside of the porch. I thanked him for stopping by and asked if I owed him a trip charge and he said no - that he really hadn't done anything for me. I told him that yes he had - he had eased my mind that there was no damage.
So off to the back yard I head to mow and guess what!? If you guessed I saw a snake you would be correct and it was so fast it got under the fence into the "deadman's zone" between my yard and my neighbor's garage before Dad could kill it. I had problems getting the mower to start but it did and I was going along ok until I got to the planter in the middle of the back yard and guess what?! Another snake! I stopped mowing and screamed at Dad who was working on the front porch and he came to the back yard but of course the snake was under the stone of the planter. Again the mower gave me problems starting but if finally did and I finished mowing except for a little bit around the planter - we wanted the snake to get out into the yard for Dad to kill it.
So we waited and waited for the snake to reappear and it didn't. By then I'd had it and I decided to see if snakes liked water or not and sprayed water all over the ground by the stone by the planter where the snake had gone under. The nozzle of the sprayer got stuck on. I had my Droid phone with me - the only time I've had it with me while working outside - because I had some phone calls that I was expecting to be returned. I had just gotten off the phone with John who had run to buy something for the upstairs bathroom when the nozzle on the hose got stuck and somewhere in the midst of all that my phone got wet and DIED! Wonderful - and I don't have a landline anymore.
So I shower and off to the Verizon store I go. I'm told I have to call the toll free number to make a claim since I pay a monthly insurance charge for my phone. I tell the guy I can't make a call since my phone is dead so they let me use a store phone. My replacement will arrive sometime tomorrow. The bad news is I don't know if I'll be able to recover my contacts or not - lovely. A Verizon guy told me to put my phone in a baggie with rice to try to suck moisture out of the phone so it's sitting in a baggie.
I had left a voicemail over the weekend with the pest people about seeing and killing three snakes since they sprayed the snake repellent and then this morning I called to tell them about seeing the two live snakes (five snakes total since they sprayed). They would call me back later this afternoon - but my phone died this morning so I wouldn't be able to get their call. I was dealing with a bad headache this afternoon and after John left I was able to go upstairs and lay down. Guess who showed up at 5:45 - the pest guy wanting to spray the snake repellent again. I wasn't up to talking to him so Dad went outside and showed him where he'd killed the two snakes and we'd seen the snakes today.
I tell ya if it's not one thing, it's something else......... :)
