I've been chomping at the bit to write this very special post. And since I should be doing laundry, I decided that now would be the perfect time to write it!
This house has been fun from the start. And by fun I mean spectacularly disaster-prone. We started out with a little mouse infestation. Day 1 of our house make-over, we met Mouse 1. Our immediate response was to jump on top of whatever was closest. In my case, it was the one-cm-thick trim in the stairwell. Not my proudest moment, nor my most brilliant...
Yea, ouch. Good thing Becky was along with her adorable rainboots
that I want to steal which I love! She checked out the situation and made sure we were clear to come down (all while showing off her muscles and nice tan):
Of course, that was just the first of it. Mice 1, 2, and 3 died nameless, as they were all caught and taken care of by our landlord (thanks Eric!). For a while, one of these was a help:
HOWEVER, you need to put something on top of these traps, because those suckers are clever! We had mice eat their way out of THREE of them before I wised up and set something heavy on top of it (literally, they ate their way out the trap by cutting the spring on top with their teeth. Grody.). And then it worked like a charm!
Needless to say (then why say it, right? What a bizarre phrase...), that was just the beginning of our mouse adventure. Here was another attempt:
Fail. It turns out the majority of the micies we heard? Were babies. Sad sad sad. And they were too light to set off these traps. But since we didn't want rabies or TB or smallpox or mad cow disease, they had to go.
Here's another attempt (set up by Katie) to catch our first named mouse, Tostito. Tostito was discovered eating some of Katie's - you guessed it - Tostitos. This set up didn't work. :(
Boo. Tostito II, Tostito III, The Counter Bandit, Sugar Daddy, Out-Cold, Vasiliev, Blood, Tail-less, and the babies were finally caught with poison (sad) and sticky traps (saddest). In addition, we had lots of fun with ants (baby powder borders around doors and windows worked like a charm), fruit flies, and a BEASTLY cockroach: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=421644000965.
Onward! While Cec and Sarah were painting their room (now my and Becky's room), they were having way too much fun to notice a bit of a leak in their red paint. And all we had in the house was water, paper towels, and Windex.
We didn't get a picture...but that's basically what it looked like.
But slap my as...butt and call me Sally, the Windex worked! We probably went through 4 or 5 bottles of it during the duration of our painting escapades- because that stuff is magical. So, to our hero:
It also worked beautifully when we realize one of the cans of paint we had sitting in our hallway upstairs (one of probably 11 cans we had while we were in the middle of reno) had rusted out and leaked probably half a gallon of paint in our hallway. We can thank the sweet baby Jesus that it was
white paint, because that stuff was probably there for a week. Whoops. (But we cleaned it so well that you probably couldn't find it if you tried!)
By the way, it's all fun and games until someone gets electrocuted:
It's alive! It's aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!
(No roommates were harmed in the creation of this post)
But I digress. This certainly wasn't a disaster for any of us, but some poor, poor turkey:
Yum.
We also had some great fun with a snow day this past February. What was a disaster for the City of Madison was a free-for-all for the Students of Madison. A selection of photos, including three foot drifts and four hours of snow-clearing labor (keep in mind we have no more than 30 feet of sidewalk and a teensy driveway...):
Oh, darling Cec, how we do love thee.
Becky taking care of icicles with a broomstick.
FIERCE.
I guess this might not qualify as a disaster, because I think disasters must be uncommon by definition. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. at our house:
What, you don't like moldy cream cheese on your morning bagel?
And lastly, here's a shot of what Nicole and I call "Tornado Madness 2011" when the storm decided to join us inside the house:
See that ceiling tile on the right? Yeah, that was only three weeks (or so) old, because we had just replaced it. Why did we replace it, you ask? It involved a (full) leaking toilet that sits directly on top of front of our entryway that was really, really angry. It was ugly. Let's just say there was a lot of bleach involved.
That's all I can think of right now. Rest assured, there'll be more to follow...
Here's one of the chairs all painted with the amazing yellow!
Taking a page from 
Look at these beauties! Aren't they wonderful? We're so proud of them. (Seriously, we're super proud. We carried them around the house to show everyone.)
