Eek! A Mouse!

First off, let me tell you right now there will not be any pictures of the mouse.  Well, mice.  Not. Going. To. Happen.

We came home from our trip last Saturday and Tom immediately got to washing the salt air and travel grime off the Beach House.  That entailed a lot of car towels, which went immediately into the washer.  And just when Tom went to open the door to the dryer, he discovered a mouse just as equally surprised by the bright light, suddenly open door and shouting. 

A few door slams, peeking inside to double check that "yep, I really did find a mouse in there" and some fast thinking later, the mouse was captured under a hastily tossed towel that was bundled and carried outside.   Cheryl got the job of cleaning out the mouse uh, 'leftovers' inside the dryer with bleach water and lots of paper towels. And Lysol spray everywhere.   

We examined the now clean dryer more closely and found the little turd maker had chewed through both the lint screen and the interior dryer vent to get from the vent tube to the dryer tub.  Not sure why he wanted inside there, but he did.   Did three loads of laundry and dried them and all seemed to be fine.  Laughed about it, told the neighbors  - who several years ago had a serious mouse infestation of their own involving three months of absence and an entire pantry full of mice upon their return.  Said neighbors kindly dropped off vent blocking metal mesh to put on the exterior of the house.  In our case this is the roof of the house.

Fast forward three days to this morning, when I needed to do another load of laundry.  Opened the dryer to find a lot more 'evidence'!  Ugh!  More spray, bleach water, half a can of Lysol, lots of paper towels and two thorough wipe downs, and a 20 minute dry run on hot with a Lysol soaked rag just for good measure.  Yes, I stuffed the hole with a rag just in case, too.  Tom got back from golf practice and we moved the dryer out from the wall, unhooked the vent tube and EEK! saw a mouse down there.  Tom jammed the two open ends together, ran outside and dumped out two very dead mice.  Not sure if it was the Lysol, or the heat or a combination, but we think that should be the last of them.  We did get the metal mesh screen thingy in place, so no more should be able to get inside.

At least that is our thinking, we'll let you know how it goes on the next load of laundry.  I was seriously considered putting a baited trap in the dryer before we found the last two.  Might just still do that.

Welcome Benjamin

One of the reasons that I was so busy with family last week is that my sister's oldest son and his wife welcomed their first child into the world one week ago tomorrow.  Here he is:

I have been remiss

I am such an unreliable blogger.  It has been a great visit in California with family and friends, but have I posted it? Nope.  Taken any pictures? Kept forgetting.  I can cobble together pictures that others have taken for some events, but on other events I will have to leave it to your imaginations to make a mental picture, because I didn't manage to get even one picture. Darn it.

Oh well, we are headed out this morning towards home, stopping in Flagstaff overnight.  The last two days have had lovely beach weather and we have been beach bums here in our Tent City on the Sand.  I CAN insert a picture here

Beach Living

The Beach House on the Move has landed in Oceanside for a few days.  One thing about the base camping facilities, you never quite know what you will see out the front window.

This is NOT us.......

While heading toward Dad's driveway a couple of days ago, the final hour brought us this unfortunate sight from the other side of the freeway.  This is a still from a video we took starting back at the bottom of the hill when all we could see was a column of black smoke.

While the motorhome was still in danger, the people were safely out and 100 yards away from the burning tow car.  We don't know how it all turned out, but we did see the firetruck headed to the scene a couple of minutes later.

We are reminded again how life can change in an instant.  We are thankful to be safely parked in Dad's driveway, and to report that once again we have been well-fed and cared for over the past three days.  

My camera skills during that period of time have completely escaped me, as I did not take a picture of either the family lunch at South Coast Plaza nor the Girlfriends at 60 dinner last night.  But rest assured that both gatherings were wonderful times together and the visit with Dad has been marvelous.  I think Dad might even be able to beat me if we both walked around the block.

Road Construction Ahead

250 miles from Flagstaff to Las Vegas.  For the first 145 of them we had NINE road construction projects consisting of: Warning of construction ahead, lower speed limit coming. Reduction of speed from 76 to 65 to 55 to 45. Left (or right) lane closed ahead. Move traffic to said lane.  All of this taking about two miles to accomplish, then we finally get to the construction zone which invariably consisted of two pickup trucks and three or four guys working --maybe a 50 foot stretch--and for this we got to drive single file at 45 miles per hour for two miles.  Nine times in 145 miles.  You do the math.

If you don't like the weather...

Wait two hours.

Greetings from Flagstaff, AZ, elevation 7000, where we are in the midst of a gully washer thunderstorm complete with lightning, hail, thunder and rain.

We drove over from NM this morning, and stopped at one of our favorite - dang the lightning and thunder just happened simultaneously and the hail is now so loud Tom and I have to shout to be heard inside the Beach House - anyway, at one of our favorite and little known National Monuments, Walnut Canyon.  It is about 5 miles east of Flagstaff on interstate 40, but not nearly as well visited as the nearby Grand Canyon.  Which really is a shame, since Walnut Canyon has numerous cliff dwellings that can be seen up close from the adjacent trail.  Much closer than the more famous dwellings at Mesa Verde and Canyon De Chelly.  So that's my little tourist plus for today.

See if you can spot the dwellings from the trail up on the rim.

Two people in white on trail over the biggest dwellings. Little do they know what is under their feet.