i'm sure that most of you are expecting fabulous pictures of maui... that will have to wait. 1- i'm still working on uploading and organizing the 500+ pictures (mostly some combination of water/beach/rocks/sunset) and 2- something else way more pressing came up.

we have bats.

i took a picture of the first bat, but i decided that really, no one wants to see gross bats. that, and you can clearly see a giant furball (not an actual animal) in the picture and i don't want anyone to think we have bats cause our house is dirty. even if it is dirty. that is not why we have bats.

it all started on tuesday night. i was sitting in the living room after dinner, uploading some pictures on the laptop. i noticed that there was something moving inside of the box fan that was still sitting in front of the window. we haven't used the box fan for a few weeks because it's been really hot and humid in st. louis (gotta love a st. louis summer!) but we haven't put it away yet. the cat also noticed some movement and went over to look at the fan. i could see that there was something small and black inside of the fan, but just assumed it was a leaf or something like that. but it kept moving... and the cat seemed more interested... i got up to check it out and just as i leaned down, a foot sticks out of the fan! i screamed (at the point i was thinking it was a giant spider) and ran upstairs to tell mike that we had some creature living in our fan. mike was taking a shower and didn't seem all the concerned, he told me to go try to get a better look at it, it was probably my imagination. not wanting to get any closer to the fan, i grabbed my camera (with zoom lens!) and zoomed in on the fan. looking at the picture, you could clearly see that it was a bat. awesome. so i went back upstairs, showed mike the picture, and made him deal with it. he took the fan outside and took it apart so the bat could get it. it appeared to be a baby bat (was really small and not moving much). baby or not, it was still a bat, and still gross. we cleaned the fan and went back inside... i walked into the living room and saw... another bat. this one was in the middle of the floor! ugh! after getting that bat out of the house, mike went into the basement where he found 2 more bats. all of the bats were little and seemed to be sick or something cause they weren't flying or anything.

we called a bat removal company first thing the next morning. they are coming out tonight to give us an assessment, but just based on what we described to the guy on the phone, he said it is likely that we have a baby nursery colony of bats, which means we can't do anything until they are old enough to fly and exit our how on their own. bats are apparently protected so you can't trap them like you could with other critters. i'm hoping we just have tiny bats and we can get rid of them now! i'll keep you updated :-)

along with the bats, we've also been having a bug problem, and our garage door decided to stop working. yay homeownership! stuff like this just bugs (ha!) me because every time we have to deal with something not fun like paying for bat removal, means it will take even longer to save up some money to get to other house projects.

also, reese had his surgery this morning for his leg. they decided to just do the left leg instead of both, they did another xray this morning and decided the right leg wasn't as bad as they first thought. i'm glad that they took the time to look over everything again before doing the surgery. he's out of surgery now and is just starting to wake up, we should hopefully be able to take him home tomorrow!