Uh-oh...we seem to have a leak...

So, I walked into the kitchen this morning, a couple of hours after breakfast, and saw a small puddle of water on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Then I noticed a drip from the ceiling. When I looked up, I saw a "blister" of dry wall hanging down from the ceiling, dripping water...
Here is a close-up...you can see there are water stains around the light fixture also. The blister is about 2"x4.5"...
About 1-2 feet away from the blister and stains are 2 more circles of water stains, about 1.5" in diameter each...
My first thought was that our master bathroom shower was leaking. Upon further investigation, it appears that the water is coming from somewhere near the furnace that is on the second floor in the laundry room (adjacent to our master bathroom shower). You can see a puddle of water near the bottom of this photo.
There is also water puddled in the leg of the furnace. I put an old towel down to soak up the water. Most of the dripping in the kitchen has now stopped and the blister has shrunk. Luckily, we have the builder coming by tomorrow to look at a couple of other things, so he can take a look at the leak while he's here.
I noticed another oddity yesterday on the porch roof over the front door. If you remember, the roof in this area is made out of metal. I guess the snow and ice started to fall off the roof and froze in place, in the shape of the metal roof slats.
So, Tortellini the tortoise loves to eat! Here he is chowing down on his dandelion greens, romaine, and collard greens...
The only problem is that he usually ends up standing on top of them, and can't figure out where his breakfast disappeared to!
Here is a video of Tortellini eating...

He ate!

I rearranged the "furniture" in our Russian Tortoise's cage this morning in the hopes that he would discover the warmer basking spot where the heat lamp shines. It worked, and after he was under the warmth, he also ate - a lot! (Tortoises and lizards can't digest their food unless they are warm enough.)
Yum...
I worried he might mistake my finger for some food!
More?
He feasted on kale, romaine leaves, and some squash and he seemed to thoroughly enjoy it!
I think his name is going to be Tortellini...

A couple new additions...

So, there are a couple of new additions around here. First, we have a new pet - he is a Russian Tortoise and he does not yet have a name. We think it is a male, but we thought our bearded dragon was a male until she laid eggs. The girl at the pet store said that it was too young to tell what sex the tortoise is yet.
Here he is from the front. He will be 6-9" long when full grown. I think he is 4-5" long now.
This is the cage we used to have our bearded dragon (lizard) in. I think it will work well for the tortoise also. He is still very nervous and huffs at us when we touch him or pick him up. This morning he was a little more curious and was peeking out the window of the cage instead of hiding his head in the corner.
The other new addition is the bookcase we bought for the powder room. Our powder room is near a door that leads out to the pool so we made an "L"-shaped powder room where we could incorporate a changing area. We placed the bookcase in the short side of the "L" and bought fabric containers for people to put their clothes in while swimming.
We also hung this fun mirror on the wall so people could see themselves full-length...
Here is what the tall part of the "L" looks like - you can see the position of the mirror on the far right...
And this is how the bookshelves and mirror are positioned in relationship to each other. We also bought 2 small square tables to use for a bench near the bookshelves, but I decided they were too deep and stuck out too far into the room. They didn't go to waste however - we used them to hold the tortoise's cage.
DD headed back to college yesterday and I am moving DS into his dorm today. We will be true empty-nesters for the first time.

Happy New Year!

It's been a busy few weeks around here, so I have a lot to catch up on! We celebrated our 27th anniversary the week before Christmas. It turned out that we had a church choir rehearsal/party that night, so we went out to eat before the party. I gave DH a new coffee mug...are you hypnotized yet?
Now you can read the outside of the mug! Unfortunately, it is too large to fit in our coffee maker, but I still like it!
DH removed the door off the "water closet" in our master bathroom. We never close the door to the toilet area anyway and the door blocked the light switches just inside the bathroom.
He took off the moulding pieces on the door frame edge and patched where the hinges and plate were. Here is a shot of the moulding on another door frame...
And this is how it looks where DH removed the moulding and hinges - what a great patching job!
DD and I made a couple of batches of peanut butter cookies to give to the orchestra members who played at church on Christmas Eve. Most of them turned out great (although you would never know that those were bell-shaped peanut butter cups that we put on top)...
A few of the cookies in the final batch didn't fare quite as well - I walked away and came back to find little chocolate blobs under the cooling rack! We gave some of the holey cookies to my brother-in-law and told him we'd taken all the calories out of his cookies. :-D I embroidered shirts for myself...
and for DH...
and for DD (DS has a Bah Humbug shirt to wear for Christmas)...
And I got the most awesome gift from DH for Christmas - a Segway!
DD and I spotted these deer behind our house - they only look like they are eating DH's newly- planted grass...
So, on Tuesday I looked out the window and didn't see the hunter's blind behind our house. The chair was still there however, which led me to believe that the blind wasn't gone because the hunter had come back for it - he would have taken his chair too.
So, DD and I took a hike down back to see if we could find the blind. DD spotted it in the pond!
We decided to try and get it out before the temps dropped and the pond froze around the blind. We tried several different sticks that we found lying around, but they all broke.
We finally got it out - DD pushed with a stick from her side and I pulled with a stick from my side. Here it is after we got it out of the water...
We carried the blind and the folding chair up to the driveway so the blind could dry out. I guess if the hunter ever shows up looking for them, he'll have to knock on the door and ask for them.
Have a wonderful 2009!