Phew!

Hi all!
I'm sorry I've had the same post up forever Lac! I'll try to remedy that now...

So, I've been a little more busy than normal the last few weeks. I've got a job. I'm a receptionist at a very slow paced oil company. Neat, huh? I like it. It's right up my alley! I've been stuffing envelopes, typing up information, and helping them "upgrade" their record system (in accounting) to all digital (this last involved scanning old invoices and saving them in as a pdf). Oh, and I answer the phones. Roughly 3-5 times an hour. Sounds tough, huh? Super cool!

Anyways, I've been getting super excited to get on an airplane (3 of them! Each way!) and fly to see my Mommy. And the rest of my family. And Sheena's wedding. YAY!!! It's just now hit me that I'm probably going to miss Hal like crazy though... It's a sad though... I might just cry!

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OK, so story time! A few weeks ago, we got our electricity bill. It was an incredible almost $300! (Like $286.) Well, golly gee why don't you just hit me with a baseball bat?! Anyways, once we got over the shock and anger, we seriously decided it's way past time to get someone to spray insulation into our attic. (We had like 3 inches... way lower than the recommended 12 inches!)
So, Hal made arrangements for someone to come do that for us.

And then we decided that before they come, we should pull out the heater (installed in the house in 1961, they have been unofficially declared a fire hazard) in the bathroom ceiling. (It's turned off and on by a light switch beside the regular light switch.)

Hal got to work trying to get this thing out of the ceiling. One of the biggest problems being that when we flipped the breaker to the bathroom, it turned off the bathroom light, and also turned off the hall light. And then he couldn't see. So we made the decision to leave the breaker on, and he'd just be really carefull with those wires.
During the whole removal event, he shocked himself! He hollered and dropped his tools! Scared me halfway to death! But he was OK. Apparently it just scared him, mostly.

Then we decided to replace the light switch in the bathroom with an electrical outlet. 'Cause, well, everyone needs an outlet in their bathroom! It gets really old stringing an extension chord along the hallway to the bathroom every time I wanted to blow dry my hair.

So I did my part and replaced the socket (I've successfully replaced all but 2 electrical outlets and 2 light switches in my house). I DID turn off the breaker that goes to the bathroom and used my headlamp to see. Everything was going so well! I was trimming the last wire with my wire cutters... And there was this "POP" noise! And the sparks flew! I got zapped! Hard! I yelped so loud! I scared Hal half to death! (Revenge!!! OK, so it wasn't on purpose, but...)

Anyways, I was so super confused! And furious! (Once I got past the scare of thinking I'd been electrocuted!) I turned off the breaker and everything! How did that happen?!?!?! GRRR!!! Bad word!!!

Wow! Hal went into the bedroom and looked at the breaker box to see if he could figure out what had happened. And noticed that there were two breakers turned off. The one I had turned off for the bathroom, and... the one labeled "heater"... Ta da!
Guess what?! If we'd used our noggins and GUESSED we might have saved us both a good zapping! Anyways, we pulled out our circuit tester (yes, we did have one, I just assumed that I had the breaker off and didn't need to test the wires to make sure they weren't live. Bad assumption! I'll never assume that again!) and tested a few wires. We learned that indeed there are two breakers that go into our bathroom. The one for the light and the one for the heater! (Hal could have worked on removing the heater from the ceiling with the bathroom light ON and the heater breaker OFF, and he wouldn't have gotten shocked! And I could have turned them BOTH off and I wouldn't have gotten shocked! GRRRR!!!)

Turns out that Hal's friend Jake was right. (He's an electrician.) He told Hal one time that as long as you have a breaker box, you won't die if you get zapped by live wires. It'll just flip the breaker.

The neatest part of the whole thing was seeing the singed wire insulation! The wire and insulation were totally burned by the electricity! I had to trim the wire back past the burned part. I kept it and I've got it sitting on my desk by the computer. The insulation was totally burned off! Neat!

And just for all of you who want to know what getting zapped by a wire in the house feels like... Go grab an electric fence! The feeling of getting shocked by an electrical wire in my house was... wait for it... just like getting zapped by an electric fence! The same muscle clenching, terror striking, awful, painful feeling! Ugh!

And that's my story of the zapping...

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Oh! And last night I was on my way to bed and I saw this little tiny pink thing stuck to my wall. So I walked closer to see what it was. (I knew it wasn't a spider. Spiders aren't pink!) It was like an inch long, pink, and it had legs and a tail. It looked like one of those little sticky toys you can get out of the quarter machines at stores... know what I'm talking about?
And then it moved. And I knew what it was! It was a gecko!!! The same kind that are getting stuck to my sticky traps! What is it doing on my WALL!!!!! They can live in my kitchen and eat my kitchen bugs, BUT STAY OUT OF MY BEDROOM!!! EEWWW!!!!
At the same time though, I kinda want to catch it! It was a little baby lizard! Ohhh!!! Too cute! I don't have one of those! Are leopard geckos reptiles or amphibians? Hmmm....
Eeewww!!!

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And I've been meaning to say this for just forever! I have the sweetest husband ever! For my birthday he got me a keyboard! 'Cause I've been missing playing the piano! (I'm not very good, but I enjoy it.) Isn't he just the sweetest?!