Post #100! And The Rain, Rain, Rain Came Down, Down, Down

100 posts in almost one year! Hozzah!

And, of course, you parents out there will recognize the title of this entry as having been taken from The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh:

And the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down
In rushing, rising rivlets
And the river crept out of its bed
And rushed right into Piglet's.

We are on the 24th consecutive day of rain here in the Northwet [sic]. I love it! My dad asked yesterday if I were at all depressed by it. I said, "No, I'm depressed for other reasons" -- like the rat in our house's walls that chewed a one inch hole in one of our water pipes and caused a giant leak in our downstairs/garage area. Hello, Plumber! Goodbye, $500! And then, last night, the giant rat (he must be giant, what normal rat can chew through plumbing?) was at it again on our new pipe. Saw. Saw. Saw. No sleep and a lot of pounding on walls and floors, trying to scare him away, ensued for me. We've filled the walls with poison, the inner closets with traps, and we even put one of those pulsing sonar thingies in an outlet to drive them away. But still it's: saw, saw, saw. Plus, when the plumber was here, he asked if we had carbon monoxide detectors in the house. I said, "No. Why?" He said that it looked as though our furnace were on its last legs. Oh, and our water heater too.

Why did we buy a house again?

At least we still have a roof over our head to keep off the rain (thus far). Some people do not even have a dilapidated home to call their own. So, I'm going to try to force myself to be grateful. And, of course, part of us is tempted to sell the house "as is" and just not mention the myriad problems herein. Then, the better angels of our natures rise up and demand that we do better unto others than was done unto us. Crap. So, today I will call for estimates on furnaces and water heaters. Jason is on the exterminator front. We'll get this house habitable, and then we'll move into another set of somebody else's problems. Or is that cynical?

We're heading to Ottawa in a couple weeks. Maybe the house will explode while we're gone. Maybe the carbon monoxide will rise up and kill off the rats (poetic justice). Probably, it will have all been fixed by then, and we will arrive home to something awful that is new (and completely unrelated to the known problems) to tackle and spend money on.

Januarys stink.