Ian told me that if we were going to have a blog about our new house and our lives in edmonton then it was not really applicable to write about toronto, vancouver or show photos of our cats when they were babies. But Ian is not here right now. Plus two people have asked to see what the stars of "This Old Cat House" look like. So here are some of their best:

kerry playing with plum and tasha waiting until plum is tired enough so that she can eat her up:


now tasha is waiting for toshi to tire out...then she will gobble her up too:


tasha is FULL now:

the toilet is fixed! here it is all put together. isn't it just the greatest looking toilet?
this happened in three (simple) attempts:
1. Ian bought the black stopper for the bottom of the tank. Upon removing the old one he snapped off the ancient plastic so there was nothing to clip/attach the new one onto. Luckily he had a can of strange stick-anything-to-anything glue which he used to basically glue the parts together. That part actually seems to be working fine so far.
2. I tried to replace the ballcock (no joke, that's what it's called) which is the long tall piece that the bobber attaches to. this was going well until I discovered that I could not even budge one of the plastic screws on the bottom of the tank. No problem, I'll just wait until my strong sweetheart gets home, he can unscrew it and then I will do the rest.
3.NOPE! there is no tool in our hosue that expands to fit around it, Ian could not unscrew it, I could not unscrew it, so we just hammered it out. Great, this is going fabulously now, and luckily Ian is working at Totem so anything we break he can get a great price on a new one! We finally get the screw out, remove the old ballcock (by the way, the uncooperative screw was called a NutBall) and once it is out of the toilet we notice that the floater that is supposed to stop the water has a huge hole in it! No wonder the toilet was running. The ballcock was not to blame here! Nonetheless we had a shiny new ballcock so I was committed to installing it, which we did...only to find out: It was too short! And believe us, size does matter when it comes to ballcocks. No matter, it is working just fine now, and I am happy that I do not have to go all the way down stairs in the middle of the night to pee.

I want to say THANK YOU to my dad, who I phoned long-distance in London Ontario to ask some starting up questions. And he does get "I Told You So" rights b/c he suggested that before we take the ballcock out we just try mucking with the floater ball, b/c that is most commonly the problem, which it was.

So, there it is, the first repair job at our new house. I guess I could also take photos of the weather stripping and the new light in the living room, but somehow after the satisfaction of fixing that toilet those other tasks are just as routine as brushing your teeth. yeah right.