We can now add another animal to our list of garden critters, a woodchuck or groundhog as they are also known. We saw one last year in a neighbour’s garden just fleetingly, but today we have seen him twice helping himself to the birdseed which drops on the floor round one of our trees. We managed to get a quick photo of him before he darted off. We also have some baby rabbits/hares in the garden, which are really cute.
We had to have our truck serviced on Friday and the bill was extortionate – $45. Honesty I don’t think a garage in the UK would even look at a car for that sort of money let alone service it. I know it was one of the smaller services (30,000km) but still.
It is really hot here at the moment and has been for several weeks. We had a few cooler days (low 20’sC) last week but mainly it has been in the high 20’s. Today we got 34C which is really too hot and the weather man suggested with the humidex it felt like the low 40’s which I can well believe. The heat is even wearing the squirrels out and they can be found flaked out in the trees and on the seed boxes, they are so funny.
We have been successfully keeping the growing number of raccoons at bay. So far we have noted two different mothers with five babies each and another with three. They are totally adorable, but they keep coming out in the day and they literally take over the feeding stations in the garden, which means the squirrels, and chipmunks are frightened off. Hubby has devised a plan that involves using the hosepipe to flush them out of the garden. For some reason they are quite happy to sit out in the rain and eat, but don’t like to be hosed. We don’t care if they come around at night and finish off the leftover food, but to steal it from our “regulars” during the day is just not on.
On Monday the car went into Ford to see what was making it vibrate so much and after a test drive it was established that a block of ice had formed inside one of the wheel rims and was causing it to be unbalanced. This was pretty much what we thought it might be.
Ford took off all the wheels and jet washed them for us. In all it was in the garage for about an hour and they charged $30, so not too bad. And most importantly, it no longer vibrates.
We decided last week to change our office around. It was in the fourth bedroom downstairs in the basement, but we felt that one of the rooms we had renovated was not being used, so we decided to use it as an office area.
We ordered new desks for the office as we only had cheap ones that we got when we first landed and they weren’t very good. We decided to treat ourselves to some really nice dark wood desks. We were going to get a couple of desks that were cheaper then these, but they weren’t quite as nice and we decided to go mad. We ordered them off the Office Depot website and were given a delivery date of Wed 21st Feb. We waited in for the delivery, but at 3pm ish a guy from office Depot called to say that he did not have them in stock and would have to get them from another store. I was not happy as we had waited all day for them and no one had called before to let us know the problem. They waited until the last hour of the delivery window to let us know.
After lots of moaning and negotiating, he said that he could get them delivered for the following Wednesday (28th). I asked for compensation for the inconvenience etc and he surprised me by giving me a $100 reduction off each desk. I was happy with that as this made them the same price as the alternative desks we nearly bought because they were cheaper.
So, on Wednesday once again we waited for the desks to arrive. I phoned in the morning to check the progress and was assured they would be delivered before 5pm. At 3.15pm the delivery guy phoned to ask for directions and said he was just leaving the shop. We are about 20 mins from the shop so expected him by 3.45 ish.
He eventually arrived at 5.45pm, better late than never I suppose. He turned up in a Dodge Caravan and the guy was huge, I mean really huge. He could barely walk, let alone pick up the boxed desks. He had another guy with him and they really struggled to get the two desks in the house.
After they left we had dinner then set about putting the desks together. As I said, we had decided to buy good desks, but they had so many parts and they were so heavy, it took us two hours to put one together. After one we decided to stop and do the other the following day.
We now have two really nice desks and our new office space looks really great, we are really pleased with it. Also because these desks had drawers (how posh is that!!!) we can put everything away. Our other desks didn’t, so everything was on top and on shelves etc. I know it is really sad to get so excited over a couple of desks, but what the heck.
