You're never going to believe it

But you can find the floor in our home office.

Taxes still aren't done and I haven't even gotten to Sept-Dec in quickbooks from the business yet.. but I have something to show for it.

In true squirrel chasing fashion after hunting for the missing statements, receipts and records I realized (for the 9000th time) that I REALLY REALLY REALLY needed to get organized. We're making baby steps in that aspect, but the office since 3 moves ago has never gotten back to the point where it was organized enough for me to find anything in it easily. Partly because mover guys dumped the entire contents of file cabinets into boxes and I never bothered trying to reassemble the order in it with all the other more pressing issues in my life.

But now, business has slowed down, 3/4 of the kids are in school and when I walked out of the room I left white foot prints on the dark brown carpet from the dust in there. And nothing says "you need to clean me!" quite like having a layer of dust that thick that you can leave footprints in it and with it.

So that's been the week's biggish project.

The other project was finding my camera.

Lemme tell you about that. Two years ago we had the house treated for termites and we got suckered into a "buy now" sort of deal where they removed all the mouse/rat/rodent filled insulation and replaced it with rodent repelling blown in insulation also. With promises that you'll never have rodents in your attic again. This of course has been a long term issue for us. Our first house we killed 36 mice the first year and in the course of remodeling that house I realized I'm quite allergic to the dumb things. And here in CA not only are there mice, there are RATS and those make me ill just thinking about. So the promise of not having them in the attic we'd spend a whole lot of time up running new wires, etc... was too much to pass up.

Of course as in many other cases of our lives, the people we hired weren't as great as promised. Dreadful in fact. And there was a big hang up with our attic being bigger than they anticipated so a 1 day job turned into 3 days. (how can you miscalculate an attic? It's not like there's a surprise room there or anything. Sigh -  but I digress) Anyway it was a HUGE mess, and of course the guys getting paid for 1 day of work for 3 days of labor weren't happy and as such did a really terrible job. Of course if they all worked in stead of letting 2 guys do all the work while the rest of them sat around complaining for the group it might have actually been done in a day.

So, once it was "done" I refused to sign that the work is done because they put a foot through the ceiling and wanted them to have incentive to come back and fix it. We were on really good terms at this point, obviously. Larry got involved, they fixed the ceiling but didn't care about the insulation job being done poorly.

Fast forward 2 years. I hear something big running around in the attic. This of course can't be the case because we have the insulation that repels them, right? But, oh, wait, I hear foot steps on drywall which means... you got it, there can't be insulation there.

So. Because I finally took down our artificial tree (yesterday. yes. Feb. we're setting a record here) I went to bring it up to said attic and while I was up there I brought a flash light and tried to see just how bad the lack of insulation was up there.

If you haven't seen our house, it has alot of peaks and ridges and cathedral ceiling so it's not a simple attic like a "normal" house would be like. Normal Californians don't use their attics. We put stairs in so we could use it. However alot of the space has enough room for a 115 lb guy to squeeze through, especially on the cathedral parts.

So I get up there and crawl around and see that at least one corner isn't insulated (gee, and I wondered why that room was 10 degrees colder in winter...) and decide to call them and see if they'd do anything about it.The insulation/pest control people.

I call the local number and it's routed to the nationwide company. And answered by a lady with a thick southern accent. Kinda a give away that it's not here in southern California. But I ask, just to make sure. "Hi, I'm trying to reach my local office" and she says oh, no you can't get the local office number. So I tell her that we got the "never have a rodent again" attic treatment and it sounds like a chipmunk is running around the attic. She says they don't cover chipmunks. So I say "ok, maybe it's not a chipmunk, I can't stand the thought of it being a rat, but we indeed have a rodent" and she says she'll pass the message along.

Ha. yeah, I'm sure I'll get called back.

So in a rumbling rage of sorts I decide to go up there and take pictures of the job they did and will write to the corporate office.

I put on my rain coat thinking that it'll keep the insulation stuff from sticking as I crawl around, put my camera in one pocket and my phone in the other (because you never know, you might get stuck and need to call the fire dept sort of logic). And I get to the first corner and take my pictures, pop the camera in my pocket, nearly fall through the ceiling at least a half dozen times (why I had the phone, of course) crawl up to the start of where I fear coming nose to nose with super monster rat, reach into my pocket to take the pictures and...........


No camera.

It fell out between corner a over my bedroom and corner b over the office. Which is the entire house, essentially. And of course it's not the rolled in insulation, it's the blown in fluffy stuff. So I re-trace my steps and can't find it.

Start feeling around in insulation with a stick.. nothing.

Go get a rake and rake it, get it stuck in electrical cords.. still nothing.

Get Larry's big magnet on a stick and wave it through everywhere.

Found a few nails, some bits of scrap metal of some sort but no camera.

And of course at this point 3 hours have passed and I have to go get the kids.

Get the kids and contractor trash bags and dust masks.

And after dinner went back to the attic and moved every.square.inch. of the insulation in that attic until I found the dumb camera. In the last 5 feet of space.  I've been coughing up dust since. When they list a class action lawsuit on the rodent killing insulation giving lung cancer, I'm signing up.

But the pictures of the office ceiling haven't been taken. At this point it can wait.

And all this started because I wanted to do our taxes, started to clean the office, found the contract from the insulation, brought the Christmas tree into the attic..... 

And that, my friends is how nothing gets completed, only a dozen other projects get started.  Please pass the Ritalin.