The weather was surprising and warm today! So warm that the butterflies were confused! This one landed on my foot while I was absorbing the sun and making the vitamin D.
[T - the butterfly is licking sweat off J's foot; you can see the proboscis unfurled and poking Jessica. It has pretty orange and brown patterns on the top of the wings, but displays excellent cryptic coloration on the bottom. Very bark/leaflike!]

And, as promised, we'd like to share our creepy basement/cellar and poop-filled attic. The door to our basement is in our 'hobby' room next to our front door. Here's a view of it.
[T- the jars in the upper corner are J's olives]
It opens and there are stairs! (exciting, I know)
After climbing down the stairs,
you see this
Seriously! That's a real polar bear head (it's even moldy). The cellar is chilly, so I suppose a polar bear fits? Who knows what the previous occupants were thinking. And the rest of the cellar:
It runs under the entire house, as far as we can tell. It's mostly dirt 'floors' and empty boxes.
[T- as far as I can tell, it's actually sealed off really well. I couldn't find any signs of animal life down here. We found moldy books down here, some of which we brought up to air out on account of them actually being worth reading. There were other less appealing books that were insufficiently charismatic to escape their cold dark moldy despair.]
And the attic! The door is in our bedroom.
It's one of the pull down type doors, with stairs and everything
[T- I had a non-blurry photo of J doing this too, but she elected for the blurry one instead. Something about it being hard to tell with tiny thumbnails and whatnot]
Here it is. It also has empty boxes.
There's also a futon frame, an empty suitcase, some roll-up padding, a bucket, and a polar fleece sweater filled with rat-poo. It seems that we found woodrat #2's bed. Charming, no?
[T- we also helped Billy lay some phone line to his cabin today. Apparently rodents got to it in too many places and patches weren't cutting it anymore, so he decided to lay a whole new one, and he's going to tie it up off the ground to discourage critters and whatnot from disrupting important phone calls. We mostly just stood at strategic points and kept the line feeding out. It was not very challenging, but today was an absolutely beautiful sunny day so even just standing around was fun.
We also made acorn squash and white bean soup! It was pureed and yummy!
Oh, also, we ordered a few more things with John's bulk food order and they came today, so that's really exciting. We got better than bullion, loose tea, and frozen pizzas.]