Category: Around the House

Hurricane Charlie has come and gone without doing much damage (thankfully). Dixie’s house lost some shingles, but that’s the only damage I’ve found. I did go running after the trash barrel before it blew into someone else’s yard, but damage was averted in that case.

We got a lot of rain. The back yard and ditches flooded as expected. What we didn’t expect was that the road flooded too. It looked like we had a river at the end of our driveway for a little while.

For a while a little bird took shelter at the bank near our front ditch. It sat there and peeped for a while before disappearing. We’re not sure if it got blown away or decided the wind was calm enough to fly.

This morning, at around 4 AM, the fire alarms went off! I was out of bed and down the hall before I realized there was no smoke. CDF and MDF went to the front door anyway while I grabbed the fire extinguisher and checked out the house. My next thought was that one of the batteries had died. A couple of days ago I had realized it was past time to change them.

We only had one battery. I changed the apparent culprit in MDF’s room. But a few minutes later they went off again… so with no more batteries I unpluged the one in our room (which stopped the ringing and seemed to confirm my suspecion that it was a low battery problem). It was time for a trip to the store.

I headed to Food Lion hoping it was a 24 hour store… nope. Then I saw Harris Teeter with it’s sign proclaiming “Open 24 Hours.” Three 9-volt batteries coming up. By the time I got back and replaced the batteries it was already 5 o’clock in the morning. Fortunately the alarms were happy again and have kept quiet all day.

One thing to note, MDF was undisturbed by the commotion and didn’t really wake up until CDF had carried her to the living room. At her age I guess it was a good thing.

Tropical storm Alex looked like it was going to be the first big storm of the season, but all we got was a little rain and some impressive clouds:

It did finally turn into a class 1 hurricane and flood Ocracoke Island, but other than that it was a good start to the hurricane season.

I had yesterday off as part of the 4-th of July holiday. So yesterday, we spent most of the time doing stuff around the house. CDF and I cleaned up the computer room in the morning, and in the afternoon I took MDF to church with me to pay bills while CDF experimented with decorating a cake.

At the office in the church, MDF was crawling around and went out the office door. I noticed she was gone and was about to go get her and bring her back when I heard her make a noise. I looked up and she was back in the doorway looking at me as if to say, “I’m back, did you miss me?”

CDF’s cake experiment didn’t turn out well, so she’s decided to let Mrs. Joy bake MDF’s birthday cake. She’s settled on a Strawberry Shortcake theme. She’ll still make a cake, but it’ll be a simple one with one fancy candle.

We swam in the pool again in the afternoon. I had forgotten to turn off the water when I was filling it on Saturday, the water was up to the “Do Not Fill Past” line, and was too deep for MDF to sit by herself. So we held on to her and “swam” her around a lot. She appeared to try put her face in the water, but the two times she’s done that before, she get’s water up her nose. CDF did say that babies go under water all the time in certain classes for them, but I’m still worried about letting MDF try it.

A group of mocking birds showed up yesterday morning on our back fence. I heard a bunch of squawking while I was fixing my lunch for the day and saw a couple of baby birds sitting on the back fence. They were soon joined by their parents and soon lined up along the back fence. I ran to get my camera and got a couple of pictures. They didn’t stay around long.

Then another baby bird started squawking…