Archive for June 2009

A bat removal specialist came on Friday night. After inspecting our house and listening to where/when we'd seen the bats, he gave us the bad news (and then the worse news). We probably do have a nursery colony of bats, meaning there are probably lots of them living somewhere in our house (in the walls or above the ceiling or in old abandoned fire places, etc.) Fun fun. The worse news was how much it would cost to get rid of them! This was the only guy we've spoke too, but I'm not very optimistic that anyone else would be much less. Even half of the price that this guy quoted us would be too much for us right now. We haven't seen any other bats in our living space since Tuesday so I think that we're going to give it a few weeks and see what happens. We can't do anything right now anyway cause you can only seal off and bat proof a house after the babies are big enough to fly out, which will be in a few months. Bats are federally protected so you can't trap them like you could other pests. Apparently everyone who lives in the area probably has had or will have bats at some point, you just might never know because they might never make it into your living space. Bats can enter in through a hole as small in diameter as a pencil, and with old houses, there are little spaces like that everywhere. My uncle also called and gave us a tip of putting moth balls down in the basement cause bats don't like moth balls, so we might give that a try too.

On to good news - Reese is doing great! We were able to take him home on Saturday morning, the vet called and said he did really well Friday night and was already walking around. He was very excited to see us when we went to pick him up. He's able to walk and put pressure on his leg, which is good. He's supposed to be taking it easy, but he's not doing a very good job of relaxing. We try to carry him down the deck stairs to the backyard but he usually is out the door and down the stairs before we have a chance to stop him. He looks pretty funny, they had to shave his leg and part of his back and stomach to do the surgery. Now we just need to work on making sure he doesn't scratch at the stitches, you can even see in the picture where he's been scratching. I think he did that last night while we were sleeping. He seems like he's doing really well so far though and I am super happy with that, I was really worried about him.

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!

Did you miss me?? Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately... but I have a good excuse! We were here:
Mike and I went to Maui (Hawaii) with my family for the week. I have a ton of pictures, I'll post them as soon as I can!

here are a few more photos, i still haven't read the manual but i'll get to that :-)

eze likes to be upside down. sometimes she sleeps this way.

trevi will carry his toys around with him, i thought it was funny that he was napping with his fish.


i love the way the light comes into our living room in the afternoons and i like all of the textures in this photo.


and i still love my chairs :-)

i passed the leed exam! i thought that the actual exam was a lot more difficult than any of the practice exams that i took, but luckily all of the studying paid off.

that means i'm allowed to have my birthday present now:i am sooo excited! i started to really enjoy photography in high school and took several classes. my high school had a dark room, and since i was in the art club, i was able to develop photographs even when i wasn't taking any photography classes. in college i also took some photography classes and loved them, it was a nice (but still creative) break from all of my architecture classes. in grad school i took a class all about photography and architecture and i think it was one of my favorite classes. the camera that i had used in college and high school was a film camera - everything is digital now and it was becoming more difficult to get the photographs developed. i'd been looking at digital slrs for awhile now but never thought i'd actually get one anytime soon. i guess that mike started talking to my parents and his parents about a month ago and they decided to go together and get me a camera for my birthday! i was very surprised! i have so much to learn about the camera, but i spent some time over the weekend in backyard with the dogs and i love it so much already!

**added later - now that i look at these photos on a different computer, i must not have uploaded them right... they are very fuzzy. hmmm, guess i'll have to try to figure out a different way of posting larger photos.

* our air conditioning is now fixed! best part is that the guy fixed it for free! he's my new favorite.

* mike and i decided to try to spend as little as possible at lowes in the month of may (after spending waaaaay too much on the house in april). we only bought some stuff for the lawn and a few flowers, not too bad!

* we've been really busy (and will continue to be busy) this summer... house work has slowed down, but we're still hoping to install the new floors downstairs in a few months. that will be the biggest project we've taken on so far, i'm excited but also a little nervous about all that we need to do to prepare for the floors.

* reese has been doing really well on his pain medicine, most of the time i forget that he even has something wrong. his surgery is still scheduled for the end of june.

* i take the leed exam on friday and i'm starting to panic.

* some of my favorite people went in together and got me the best ever birthday present, it's supposed to be delivered later this week and i cannot wait! i'm not allowed to have it until after the leed exam though. more on that later :-)