A mouse in the house

Shortly after Christmas, one of our cats escaped out the basement door. Not-so-coincidentally it was the same day this happened. In the commotion of dealing with the water and having the plumber over, the door was left open for a couple of hours. The snuggly kitty stayed in and the mouse-killing-always-trying-to-escape kitty left (we did get him back about a month later, fortunately).

Unfortunately, while he was away a mouse got in the house. I came down with the brave new toddler early on a work day. The snuggly kitty was acting very odd, hunkered down in front of the oven. With a heavy heart, I looked under the oven with a flashlight and .... yeah.

Obviously the mouse didn't get into the house from that area - otherwise he would have disappeared. Since we had one potentially effective cat in the house, I pulled the oven away from the wall. Snuggly kitty rushed in. 30 seconds of squeaking later he came out with the mouse! Then he jogged to the dining room table, released the mouse to play, and promptly lost it. Idiot.

But I did see where the mouse went - it bolted to the corner of the dining room where the baseboard heating pipes run. After waiting a few minutes, I stuck my face in the corner. It certainly had at least an inch of space and was quite drafty. The quick solution was to fill in the corner with steel wool and seal the entire length of the wall with expanding foam.

It doesn't look too good, but it's a bit less drafty and hopefully more mouse proof. I may try to razor off the excess foam in the future and see if it's paintable. If I could paint it black, it would be invisible.

Snuggly cat was disappointed with the solution, though.

Squeaky clean

Excuse the delay! We left you a month ago with some indecision over whether to get a new dishwasher. Perhaps you thought our silence meant that we weren't sure what to do. Well that is definitely not the case. In fact, we'd practically hit the order button by the time I posted the blog update, and we were schedule for delivery 4 days later (and on a federal holiday, even better!).

So this guy was on the way out:

In all its grungy glory (since the water wasn't heating, the walls and seals of the dishwasher were starting to look pretty disgusting):

So a few days later thanks to a Best Buy sale that included free shipping AND installation (and removal of the old machine), we were on our way to getting a Bosch 500 series in our kitchen. We'd read some negative reviews but they were all related to some features of a "European-style" dishwasher, mostly because they don't heat dry the dishes. But since our previous model was a Bosch that heated the same (less effective but less energy-sucking) way and we liked it, we figured the new one would be fine.

Out with the old:

In with the new:

It obviously is no bigger than the last one, but somehow, it just gobbles up all our dishes and silverware and still doesn't get full. The third rack is nice, but that doesn't even seem to be the reason - we think the interior space is larger. Maybe the walls have gotten thinner? No idea, but we love it.

 Buttons and a countdown for different cycles:

And a floor light to tell us when it's on since it's so quiet (actually, it really isn't much more quiet than our previous one, but it certainly isn't noisy).

Most important, our dishes are clean and residue-free and the dishwasher seems to be heating everything nicely. For once, a fast decision on a home purchase seems to have been the right way to go.