Snowed In

So all the fun snow we received on Saturday turned into a mess on Sunday and made it impossible to get out. Yes, we skipped church (incidentally a lot of church meetings were canceled in Utah as well due to snow so we weren't too far off). Evidently, so did everyone else that lives out here in the sticks with us. It's strange because most of our ward lives in town and doesn't get snow, just rain. I am sure that they think we are all complete wusses. Our road is almost impossible to drive on with the foot of snow we got. The thought of a one mile trudge up the road to our house on my skis in a skirt after church didn't sound too appealing. We actually spent the day trying to dig ourselves out and thanks to my neighbors Reuben and Dave and their tractors, the road was drive-able by Sunday afternoon. There was still quite a bit of snow on the road and I had to use some of my long lost 4wd skills to get back up it on Monday, but it was oh so much fun :)

Bryan and the kids building a snow cave

Sunset

Alpenglow

My Monday project: dig out a tire track in our driveway so we could get up it. It was an awesome 2 hour upper body workout.

Sunset

Merry Christmas

We are in Utah so we missed the 12"+ dump of snow at our house (darn, I could have made fresh tracks off the porch!) but I thought this was a great picture courtesy of my neighbor.

Rodents of Unusual Size

This is just a classic example of how things in my life go, nothing is ever easy. Ordeals seem to follow me everywhere I go.

Our first night in the house we put Lander to bed. He comes running downstairs a few minutes later to tell us that there was a mouse in his room and that it ran out and went into our bedroom. Wonderful. I thought Lander was seeing things and we told him it was no big deal (because we didn't believe him) and sent him back to bed. About 30 minutes later I am downstairs in the living room and I look over in the kitchen and see a mouse cruising across the floor. Okay, Lander is telling the truth and it's the middle of the night and I have no mouse extermination devices. I am not squeamish, I can deal with this. My next thought is, is this the same mouse as upstairs or are there actually two mice in our house? Second thought, if I have seen two mice tonight already, how many more are there? So, I try to corner the thing in the dining room and it manages to find a hole up behind my kitchen cabinets. Great. My solution, and this sounded good at the time, pretend to be a stealth mouse killer armed with a broom and wait quietly for the mouse to come out again. I really didn't want to squash the mouse all over my new hardwood, I just thought that I could block the hole it went into under my cupboard and then I really didn't know what I would do after that, yell for Bryan while I block the hole? I quickly learned that the mouse is faster than me. I noticed that the mouse was trying to go around the edge of the dining room by a sliding window. This is where the story gets good and in my defense I was really tired, so my thinking wasn't all that great. Being the genius I am I think I can probably chase the mouse out if I open the slider and wait for him to come out again. Better yet, I have this ingenious Hansel and Gretel-esque idea that I can make a trail of bread crumbs from the cupboard to the sliding door and that the mouse will follow it and eat the bread crumbs and go outside. I wait patiently, it comes back out, takes a bread crumb and GOES BACK UNDER THE CUPBOARD!! At this point I am pissed and the idea of squashing it with the broom is becoming more appealing. I decide to get rid of the bread crumbs so I don't reward the mouse for obviously being smarter than me, open the sliding door to the patio and wait patiently, again. Sure enough it comes out again, follows the wall to the slider and goes outside on the patio. I wait a bit to make sure I don't scare it so that it runs back inside and shut the door. I then wish I had gone after it with the broom outside to squash it just to make myself feel better, but it's gone and I am fine with that.

Things go good for a couple of days and I naively think that the mouse in the house was just an isolated incident until I come home one day, go upstairs into our room, drop something on the bed and see a mouse dart out from underneath the bed and go into the vent on our fireplace. Okay, it's in my bedroom, this is war. I realize we live in the country and there are mice. I also come to the sad realization that in the weeks before our house was finished every time we came up here every window, door, sliding door was open, all the time. So, most likely, we have a whole bunch of mice in our house somewhere. I vow to kill every last one of them. At first I set out some traditional mouse traps with peanut butter, like this:

And I have some early success (I am sure I will get and angry email from PETA for this. I guess I shouldn't tell them that for work I genetically engineer mutant mice for research):

Then, they get smart and figure out how to eat the PB without setting the trap off, thieves:

So, $70 later and a trip to Home Depot I have every mouse extermination device possible(with the exception of poison, like I want it to die under my cabinet or fireplace where I can't get to it, ewwww!):

The full spectrum includes a trap that electocutes them (my personal favorite), glue traps (very efficient but you actually have to kill them after they are caught, yuck!), a transmitter that you plug in your outlet that is supposed to repel them all together (totally awesome), and a new version of the traditional trap that is kid-friendly (this one sucks).

In the last 3 weeks I can happily say that we have seen no mice or no evidence of mice in our house. We ended up buying two transmitters for the house because let's face, we live in the sticks and mice are going to be here no matter what. We even caught some that were living in the garage and we think we found the hole where they were getting into the crawl-space and into the house and immediately patched that up. So far, so good.

Bryan hasn't faired so well with the mice. In the process of taking some of our moving boxes to a friend Bryan managed to get one in his 4-Runner. He got in it one morning and it had shredded a bunch of tissues to make a nest on the floorboard under the gas pedal, so most likely it was pregnant. When he told me this, I was roaring with laughter. It's really unfortunate, but funny considering all the problems we have had with mice. He put the electronic trap in his truck and failed to catch it. He found a hole in the firewall that he thinks it has been using to move between the frame and the inside and so he covered it with duct tape. I think he may have gotten rid of it, but who knows, those things are sneaky.

Movin to the country gonna eat a lot of peaches...

We made it, we are finally in our house, in the country. Yes, we have been here a month, but let's admit it, I am lazy, too lazy to post anything for a month. Yes, there was a lot of unpacking to do, but my demise came when we got the Dish hooked up and I had DVR and all of a sudden I became a self-imposed couch potato. So I don't really have a great excuse, just that I am lzay. We are pretty much all settled in and unpacked and we can actually park in the garage now. We are doing well!

Here are my favorite things about being out in the sticks of Washougal:

1. It's quiet at night (except when the coyotes get riled up)
2. It's dark at night (unless there is a full moon which is even more intense when the darkness is not marred by street lights)
3. I woke up one morning to deer and my neighbors cow (mmmm, dinner) in my yard
4. I can shoot a gun on my property if I want to (yes, I will fit in well)
5. The crack that spans the width of my windshield in my truck makes me look like a local (I am too lazy to fix this, besides, it will just crack again)
6. Lander has an endless supply of sticks and rocks to throw
7. The dirt road up to our house is so bumpy right now it's like a mini off-road trip every time I go home
8. I am closer to the ski resort, Hood River, epic mountain bike trails and awesome road riding
9. At Lander's school open house I saw several families that were completely decked out in hunter camo. Not just the dad, EVERYONE. That is so Washougal, I love it.
10. The huge spiders that have taken up residence on our porch. Lander loves to feed them by throwing bugs into their webs, he is such a boy!

We have had a few kinks to work out in the house, but we are happy with the way it turned out. I finally got some new couches after living with the same furniture my parents gave us when we got married (which I had already lived with since I was 14). I was glad to have something new. That will be the extent of my interior decorating. I don't paint rooms, decorate or spend time trying to color coordinate anything. Ask Bryan, I didn't even hang anything on the walls in our old house. Seriously I could probably find the time to do that I really just don't care that much, I just like being here. I might buy something cool that I can just bring home a plop on the coffee table, but that's about it.

Here's a picture I took from our porch yesterday after one of the thunderstorms came through the Gorge. The hills you see are actually the Oregon side of the Gorge.

Slummin' It in the 'Couve

We are still homeless and have been living in the same small, cramped room at the hotel for almost 2 weeks now. Needless to say it is getting old and this week I was almost in tears at the thought of being here for another week. Okay, I wasn't really that close to crying, but it is getting really old.

Because I am cheap and refuse to throw even more money down the drain on a nicer hotel (um, that money would be better spent on new bikes) I decided to find the cheapest extended stay hotel I could. My sacrifice for the sake of finances resulted in the Bihlmaier family slummin' it for a few weeks. The best part about the whole situation is being in this lovely part of Vancouver (I-205 and Mill Plain, sob). It is noisy, smelly and congested. Everyday that I ride out of here on my bike to commute to work I wonder if I will actually make it across Mill Plain without getting creamed, or if I will actually make to Mill Plain without getting hit by some crazy person that is intoxicated from eating at Muchas Gracias all night. What is crazy is that if you go two blocks North or South of Mill Plain, it's a completely different town, as in one that is not noisy, smelly and congested! My second most favorite thing about the area are the people. I got home from the track late one night and decided to grab some dinner at a fast-food place close to here. I was not in there 5 minutes before some drunk guy from the bar across the street wandered in and started harassing customers. Wonderful. I sat in the corner and inhaled my food faster than usual and secretly hoped that he didn't come anywhere near me. A few days later I was leaving the hotel and there were some guys hanging out in the hallway that happened to be guests here. As I walked out one of them said "Hey, what's going on sweetie?". What the? Seriously, I object. That was definitely the low point for me.

As far as our actual room goes, our dilemma has been space. We have two adults, Lander, all of Lander's Legos, two bikes, gear to accompany two bikes, a computer, and a bunch of food crammed into a 30x20 room. The hardest part is trying to get Lander to go to bed at night. We want to stay up and read or watch TV (free Showtime), but Lander won't go to sleep if we do that. This has resulted in Bryan and I fighting over the bathroom. The toilet has become prime real estate at 9:00 at night for reading or working on my laptop. I tried to convince Bryan that sitting in the bathtub would be a good idea so we could both be in there, he didn't go for it. So, we trade off. My life is pathetic and I seriously need a vacation from my family after this. So, this is home sweet home for another week. Here's some memorable pics of our humble abode.

Lander reading my book in his underwear, what a life!

All of our crap crammed into one corner

House Fiasco

We are officially homeless. We moved out of our old house last weekend and are now living in a hotel until we can move into our new house on Sept. 1st. Moving was super-fun, can we do it again? NOT! I am glad that is over with. A huge thanks to Bryan's dad for coming up to help us. The weekend was crazy with me getting sick for 5 days, Lander almost needing stitches (thanks to our new neighbor in Washougal who is a paramedic and patched him up), having to give talks in church and Bryan having food poisoning on Monday. Nothing feels normal to me right now since we are in the hotel and I haven't ridden my bike in a week since I have been sick. As soon as I can ride, I will feel so much better. Here are some pictures of the house so far:

Exterior Color

Staircase

Master bedroom

Shower in master bath

Kitchen cabinets

House Progress

I took these pictures last Friday when I was up at the house, it's starting to look like a house with the siding and cedar shingles up.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I have been consumed with adult responsibilities the last two weeks. Our new house will be done in August so it was time to get the current house on the market. Our house is only 3 years old, but it was still a huge undertaking to get it ready to sell. This is due mostly in part to my obsessive-compulsive need to have everything near perfect. It is finally on the market and now all I have to do is keep it clean, which is easier said than done when you have a 6 year old boy.

I have been so bad about posting photos of the home building process, actually I am just lazy. Here are some progress shots leading up to the most recent pictures we took this week.

This is what it looks like today

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