Sarah's New Pajamas!

Cathy saw these at Target for under 10 bucks, and she just *had* to get them for Sarah. Sarah LOVES them and does not want us to take them off. It must be keeping her toasty! Bonus: The white part glows in the dark, which has kept us from tripping on her in the middle of the night.

Guinea Pig Update

The pigs seem to be doing fine, despite the bag incident. We just watched them carefully for several days, and nothing seems to be wrong. The vet is as surprised as we are. He asked if we were absolutely sure that they ate the bag.

Unless the Boogieman or a Gremlin came in, ate it, and framed the pigs, the PIGS ATE THE BAG.

I'm just relieved that we did not have to get the fancy vet treatment. I hope the pigs learned their lesson! (But I somehow doubt it...:)

Guinea Crisis 2009: Bag Edition

So the guinea pigs ate aproxomity half a Dillon's plastic bag sometime between 10 PM and 6 AM this morning...awesome. We'd put the bag by the door, filled with things that Kirk needed for work today.

A panicked call to the vet revealed that we could get a guinea pig's stomach pumped for *insert obscenely high figure here*, so we're doing the "watch and wait" method. The vet said that it's entirely possible they'll pass it on their own, as guinea pigs chew things down pretty small. They're in separate cages- we'll be watching for signs of distress over the next few days.

Sometimes I wish that our employers had a direct deposit to the vet option- it'd be very convenient for us! :)

Cross your fingers that everything goes well and does not involve costly vet intervention.

Boston Flee Party is GO!

We've started our Boston Blog. Check it out!

RIP Zippy (2004-2009)

We had to put down Zippy this afternoon.

She had another stone in her urethra, and the doctor said that when they come back that quickly, it will likely be an ongoing issue. She was in a lot of pain, so we decided to let her go.

They gave her an anesthetic so she would go to sleep, and let me pet her until she fell asleep. Then they took her in the back for the final part, where she would actually die.

Zippy was one of our "surprise" pigs from Pitter Pat, who we had not realized was pregnant when we brought her home. She's also one of the first pigs we were able to name. She zoomed around the cage so much that we just had to name her "Zippy!" She zipped.

We are glad that we were with her the day she was born, and we were sad to let her go on today. She was a good pig.

Boston Flee Party

We're heading to Boston this Friday, and we'll be blogging about our adventure here. We hope to see you there! :)

The Great Siding Project: Phase One

We started our siding project on Saturday. We got pretty far into it, but we're not done yet. Here's Scott (Kirk's coworker who is helping/teaching us) taking off the first board.

Scott was impressed with the stuff underneath our boards. He said it was high quality and whoever had put up our original stuff did it right. We did not have to replace the stuff underneath, which was a relief.

Kirk and Jeremy have the whole bottom off. Scott is watching from the background.

Kirk and Scott pulled off almost all of the top themselves! (We only had two ladders.)

Go Kirk Go!

Everything's off!

Scott helps Kirk saw the new boards.

Kirk and Scott putting on the new boards. (Jeremy and I were pulling off the stuff from the other side, with breaks for Cathy to run take pictures!)

Lunchtime! Papa John's was having a $5 pizza day. Score!

Side One Done! We still need to paint, of course, but the boards are up! Even unpainted it looks a million times better.

Sarah insisted on supervising.

The old siding.

A view of the unpainted but fabulous anyway siding.

Jeremy and Cathy had been pulling off siding over here, but it was slow going due to all the plants (including a rosebush) and...

The gas leak! Our meter smelled STRONGLY of gas, so Cathy called the gas people to have a look. They told us to stop working in that area until they could check it out. Good thing...

We did have a leak. Here's our old IRON meter. They replaced it with a much lighter and less leak prone one. (no picture, sorry!) Our old one looked pretty cruddy, so it's nice to have a new shiny meter to go with our new siding!

We only went partway up- we'll go back and do the rest next weekend. Everything is covered up, so it should be fine.

Sarah got tuckered out from all the supervising.

We're thinking this will be a Three Phase operation. Hopefully everything will be done next weekend so we can start painting!