Odds and Ends

A few various things from the past week or so:

-I discovered a downside to living in a new neighborhood weekend before last - I picked up a sheet metal screw in the tire of my car. I can't say for certain it occurred around our house but odds are it probably did. Thankfully it was only took a $10 plug to fix. (I really didn't relish the idea of replacing a less than two year old tire which is initially what it was looking like.)

-The door-to-door marketers have been really obnoxious since we moved in. At our old house we might get one once a month at most. Here it's been more like once or twice a week. I guess they see far more opportunity with new neighborhoods. It got bad enough that Jenny finally made a no solicitation sign for our front door.

-Speaking of things my wife has made she also did this wreath for our front door too:

-Aside from the various scuffs and smudges we put on the walls moving in we finally incurred the first self inflicted damage on the house a few weeks back. We had family over for our younger son's first birthday and because our cocker spaniel lacks any sort of manners we put in the master bedroom for the duration. He wasn't very happy about that to say the least so along with barking he also ripped up the carpet in front of the door.

-The project manager came out last Wednesday along with two other guys to fix the handful of issues we've had in the house since moving in. The soft spot in the floor upstairs ended up being a spot in the subfloor that just needed to be filled in with putty to level it out. The crack in the toilet tank in the hallway bath was limited to just the outside but the project manager went ahead and replaced it. (Learned something new - the bowl and tank are two separate pieces.) And the issue with the weather seal around the door was resolved by adjusting the strike plate. (I didn't know this was possible.) All told it took about an hour.

-There's one other small annoyance we have right now but there's nothing that can really be done about it until construction is finished concerns the sewer drain in front of our house. It currently has a barrier in front of it of rocks and wire to keep construction debris from flowing into it. Because of that however whenever we get anything short of a drizzle in a short period of time it backs up in the gutter and in front of our driveway. A few weeks ago we had a huge downpour that was high enough to keep us from going anywhere until it subsided. This was the scene a few weeks back during a particularly heavy spring storm:

Having been through several tropical storms in the past few years I'm a little concerned about what will happen if we get even more water within the span of a few hours or day as typically is the case with those.