3 reasons to be bitter

Actually, I'm quite happy on this fine Tuesday, even though I haven't even SEEN A WINDOW since 9am this morning, much less having seen the warm sunny day that was rumored to be occurring outdoors. These are just three reasons I COULD be bitter (but have chosen not to).

1. Afore mentioned plow bill. After mulling the severity of this bill, I called the source. I could go into all the very boring details about shared vs. non-shared portions of our road and other specifics, but you'd be bored senseless. The short version is that the gentleman who plows for us (who comes fast, does a great job plowing, and in general is not very expensive) is charging us to sand our neighbors shared driveway up the hill from our house , but not charging said neighbors for their share of plowing the road in general. He then gave us the responsibility of telling them that their bills were going up if we wanted to adjust the status quo. After some fine neighborhood diplomacy, I think we've got this one straightened out.

2. It looks like we're the attempted victims of identity theft by the dumbest identity thief on the planet. I've never stolen someone's identity, but my understanding of the process is that you take someone's name and personal info, SS# or what have you, and then use a false address to open up all sorts of fun credit accounts and such. It seems that somebody has made up a name, Diane Moore, but decided to use our address to perpetrate the crime. So we've been getting new credit cards in the mail, car loan approvals, etc; which of course we call and report and cancel immediately. I'm not sure what the purpose of the fraud is, but the crime of the century this is not.

3. The joys of home ownership. It's nice to be all snuggly in your warm house when the Vermont winter weather is being all freakish outside. What you don't like is sitting in the warm house observing the wacky weather causing icicles to form not only off the edge of your roof, but also from underneath the drip edge and from inside the soffit itself. At first they were just little cute ones, but when we started getting nice 3' long icicles that could probably kill a man, it was time to investigate. So after borrowing a real ladder from the neighbor down the street (not the ones who got their plow bill increased), and after spending most of the morning shoveling a 15' by 5' spot of 30" deep snow to safely erect and move said ladder around, and after unsuccessfully attempting to remove one of the 12' fascia boards and eventually resorting to cutting it out, I finally got my peek inside the eaves.
We'd been debating as to the cause of the leak, fluctuating between moisture condensation due to hot air leakage from the bathroom exhaust (vented through the soffit), to worries about ice dams causing a leakage when the icicles got huge, to worries of a combination of warm air causing the damming and leakage. A peek inside reveals that the answer lied behind door #1. While I still can't confirm that the vent is leaking and causing the problem, it seems pretty clear that the problem is condensation. Quite frankly, the plywood and framing inside there looked quite similar to your freezer when you know that it's time to defrost. Unfortunately, said frost is also accumulating over what is now moldy an warping wood. On the positive side, we now have a 12' soffit vent, so hopefully this will dry out and equalize in temperature, and a permanent solution can be achieved in the Spring.

Coming tomorrow will be all the reasons we have to be optimistic.