What a coincidence, I almost started a toad thread too.. :) Last week I walked out on my front sidewalk at night and what looked like a leaf suddenly hopped into the garden bed when I walked by! It was a big fat toad! I was so excited because he is the first toad I've seen in the yard after living here almost 5 years. I even put a large plant saucer down on the ground last year and fill it with water so the toads would access to water. (The birds drink from it sometimes too.) I think he might be living under the bulb and daylily foliage. Of course I had to run and grab the camera -

Toads eat bugs, and bugs are attracted to light, water, and hiding places. Toads, and most other frogs, also mate & lay eggs in water. The water needs to be a pond, ditch, or deep puddle, with a going mini-ecology, so that the tadpoles have something to eat & places to hide. (A saucer of water is not sufficient.) I can nearly always find a toad or two at night, waiting for dinner under the porch light. Thick, fine foliage is only a few inches away, and the automatic sprinklers keep the ground moist for both the frogs and bugs. The toads just wait for a flying bug to land on the foliage or the concrete below the light. Put in a small garden pond with a little rock waterfall, and let it run for a summer. Plant ferns or other fine foliage around it. Pretty soon you'll find that birds have brought frog eggs (stuck to their feet), and you'll get tadpoles.. and frogs. The waterfall provides aeration that is often absent in a still garden pond. Aeration is the key to beneficial organisms starting a viable ecology in the pond. Algae growing on the waterfall rocks also provides feed to microorganisms that feed the tapoles, as well as snails & other pond critters. Of course, the perfect environment for frogs is also the perfect environment for snakes.. who feed on frogs. Most snakes are very reclusive, and you may have a half-dozen small snakes in your yard and go for years without ever seeing one. (I haven't mentioned that to my wife.) Snakes also eat small rodents, which is a feature that keeps them on my "good critter" list. On warm summer nights in the south, following a rain, toads and other small frogs go noisily berserk in their mating frenzies. Drive out into the country after a rain has followed a couple-of-weeks dry spell. The ditches will be full of frogs and long sticky strings of frog eggs. The country-ditch ecology will not miss a zip-bag full of eggs, from among the billions of frog eggs that are laid in a damp summer night. (Wear high boots, and make lots of noise walking.. snakes will hear you coming & nearly all snakes will leave the immediate area if they "hear" a human.) Here is a link that might be useful: Lone Star Chapter, American Hibiscus Society

There is a way to stop junk from coming to your home. There used to be 6 mailing lists and I contacted each of them and requested to be taken off the lists. The last time I did that It was just a click on the computer. You might try googling stop junk mail. There was another one you had to write and pay a dollar, since I did that I don't get the financial snail mail anymore. Sorry i don't have the addresses. Very little junk mail comes to my. When it does it just says resident.

I would contact the granite fabricators first. Maybe they need to come back & polish that area a bit more. They would be the ones who would know how to fix the problem. Our installers did an amazing job -- there were a couple of chips on corners, they said "don't worry about it, we'll fix that". Of course, I was very skeptical they could fix it satisfactorily & watched them like a hawk & checked the work very carefully -- I couldn't see a problem at all when they were done! If they don't give any satisfaction, then I would definitely contact the GC.