Why You Should Have Resolve on Hand

This evening we went to the roomies' apartment for supper as we usually do. Shannon was working today so we were one person short. Megan cooked up some enchiladas for us and they were delicious! She threw it together on the fly too. For dessert, we had some drumsticks (the ice cream, not to be confused with a chicken or turkey or whatever it is that meat eaters eat that they call a drumstick). I ate a few bites of mine and then gave the rest to Calleigh who was quite taken with it. Naturally, she made a mess of her face and other areas (no worse of a mess than I made eating it, quite honestly.) Fortunately no real damage was made to the carpet by this spillage - - at least, no worse than the macaroni and cheese that she had previously gotten on the floor!

Last night I went to my First Aid class and am now officially certified for the next three years. How I will remember all the information since I'm sure I will barely use it, if at all, I have no idea. I did learn one interesting thing (okay, more than just one) - - don't put any ointment on burns. Never knew that. When I've gotten minor burns before, I've always put some neosporin or something of that sort on it. No more. Anywho, I'm glad I've taken the class because I do feel better prepared in case of an emergency. Now I just need to go out and buy a big fancy First Aid kit.

This morning I took Calleigh back to the fountain. She didn't seem quite as excited about the fountain as the first time. Maybe it's because we went by ourselves and she didn't have little friends there that were playing in it. That's not to say that there weren't a bunch of kids there. There were - - a bunch of three and four years old running all over the place. They just weren't going into the fountain. So really, I spent most of the time following Calleigh as she followed them. I guess she just wanted to be part of the bigger kids group.

In other news, I think someone has broken into our house and stolen the baby monitor. It was last seen with certainty on Tuesday night when I brought it upstairs. Where it has gone since then, we have no idea. I do know that on Wednesday morning, Calleigh was playing with the cord to the monitor in my room and I was thinking that she may have done something at that time with the monitor itself although I don't recall any thumping noise since she would have surely pulled the monitor off my nightstand by the cord that was attached to it. Okay, that was a very, very long sentence. The point is, we have looked high and low and every place that a 16-month old would hide something and we can't find the monitor for the life of us. And it's not like it's a small, inconspicuous item for pete's sake. But really, I have no proof that Calleigh even did something with it. It could have been me who placed it somewhere while my brain was thinking about other things. At any rate, the reasonable explanation to me is that someone has stolen it. The thing is, I don't really need the monitor at night but it is useful during her nap so I can see what's going on in there. And I'm sure I would want it to take up north with me next week. So I'll just keep on praying that we find it.

Yesterday I received a call from our tenant. I had no idea of his name other than he was a divorced gentleman. Since we have refused to renew our contract with Russell Properties, due to their extreme incompetence, we are taking over the management of the townhouse ourselves. So the tenant, who I will call tenant to protect his privacy, called me yesterday and we had a very enlightening 38-minute chat. It turns out that he was more frustrated with Russell Properties than we were! He said they would never answer his emails, return his calls, nothing. He emailed and called the owner (as did we) and he got a response from someone else at the company saying not to contact the owner again because he didn't deal with these types of things. Not only that, but right after the tenant moved in, he had a major problem with fleas (sidebar, our former tenant who was a co-worker of mine apparently had a cat. Since we had no lease, we didn't specifically tell him no pets so I suppose it was all on the up and up). He said he complained to Russell Properties about it and they assured him that the carpets had been shampooed before he moved in. That was a bald face lie. We never told Russell that especially since they never asked us if it had been done. After they told him that, they wouldn't respond to him further and he had to spend his own money to get it taken care of. How this company is still in business, I have no idea. At any rate, the tenant sounded very nice and he said he does love living there and so I think he will be renewing his lease especially since we aren't raising the rent.

He did share kind of a gross story with me though. There is a second bathroom upstairs that he never uses since he lives alone and always uses the master bathroom when he's upstairs. He said that he had a lady friend over one day and she went to use that bathroom to change. All of a sudden, he hears this loud scream. He rushes into the bathroom and there in the toilet bowl is a big, live rat. He called a plumber and come to find out, since he hadn't been using that bathroom, the water in the toilet had evaporated and the rat had then been able to climb up through the pipes. The lid had been down so the rat had chewed away some of the inside of the lid in an attempt to get out. How nasty is that? Anywho, I'm not sure he ended up resolving this little problem but needless to say, he goes in there and flushes that toilet once a week.

On a happier note, I'll leave with a couple of pictures of Calleigh. One of things that she accomplished for the first time today was that she was able to put her crocs on all by herself. She has tried it many times before (this is always an informal thing - - we aren't actually going anywhere. She is just playing and notices her crocs and decides to put them on) but she usually does it with the front facing back or something of that sort. So today she finally got one on and walked around with just one croc for a while. She eventually got around to the other one. She had it in her hand and tried backing into her chair so she could sit on the chair and put the croc on. But the chair kept moving backwards (she was on the wood floor) so she finally realized that she would have to climb on the chair facing it and then turn around. She did that and then was actually able to get the croc on from that position. I was dually impressed. I had wished I had gotten it on camera but I was so concerned she would get distracted that I didn't get it out. The other thing is that I found her sunglasses and she loved wearing them. Sometimes they weren't always right side up but no matter!