Getting somewhere

Friday turned out pretty good as Grace was able to go to school; we weren't sure at first because she was coughing and was sneezing too. But when it was time to go, she was up to it which was great news for me as I needed to get out of the house; I hadn't left the house since Tuesday. This gave me time to go to my favorite home improvement store...all together now...Lowe's! More miscellaneous stuff for the family room.

After that I picked Grace up from school and we ran a few errands on the way to the chiropractor. I really needed to go there as I had slipped off the couch while working on the lights in the family room and I had been a little sore for a few days. The chiropractor was really busy; we always go on kids day because Grace is free. But normally when we go there is hardly anyone else there. This time we had to wait quite a while before we were seen. This gave Grace plenty of time to get more toys out and befriend everyone. She was really cute; she took a stuffed turtle and was walking around to the staff members saying "Hi, I'm Mzee." She was referring to a story we had read from the library about a hippo named Owen that had gotten washed away to sea somewhere in Africa I think. After he was finally rescued, he was taken to a zoo and put in an enclosure with a turtle named Mzee that really didn't like anyone else except his handler. After a few days, they were best friends and have been inseparable ever since. Anyway she loves that story and every turtle she finds or sees is suddenly Mzee.

After getting McDonald's on the way home, we pretty much just vegged out for the rest of the day.

Today was a good day too. We sold our weight bench on eBay and the buyer was coming today to pick it up. He was supposed to come around 11 am, but for some reason he didn't come until around 4:15 pm. I got up kind of early to move the weight bench from the basement upstairs to the living room. Then I was doing projects around the house. I got the cabling completed for two of the satellite lines that come in from the roof. They both now come in the attic and down through the wall into the distribution box and then through the walls again over to the TV. Before, one of them went from the attic over to a wall and down into the family room, but then the cable was wrapped around the room to get to the TV. The other went from the attic all the way across the house and then back through the basement to the family room, but across the room from the TV, so it was wrapped around the room too. So both cables are considerably shorter now plus they aren't on the floor anymore. I still need to fix the cable that goes to the other satellite receiver. It's our HDTV receiver and they installed it later and instead of running the cable through the house at all, they wrapped it around the house and brought it in behind the TV. So I need to bring this cable in from outside into the attic and that'll be another so many yards of cabling gone from our view.

So anyway I was hooking these wires up today which was thankfully easy. I mentioned that I ran the wires up to the attic the other day and then it was as easy as connecting the wires coming in from the satellite dish to these wires today. Luckily I had no problems at all. Next (besides the HDTV cable) I need to finish running the wires out to the garage; I've already run them into the attic of the garage and now they just need to be brought through the wall to a box where I can connect everything. My uncle is going to help me run a 220 line out to the garage to install a sub-panel out there. That way we'll have plenty of electricity to run the power tools and everything else. That will be really nice. The electrical situation in the garage is entirely inadequate.

After this we can concentrate on other areas of the house. But that will only be after we're actually done with the family room remodel. We still have quite a ways to go before we're done with that.

After that I was fixing the driveway since I had received complaints from a certain family member about it's condition. After we got all that snow a few days ago, I had cleared the driveway but then when the snowplows come by they just push the snow from the street onto the end of the driveway. Since I didn't remove that snow in a timely fashion after they put it there, it had frozen into a huge chunk of ice. So I spent a couple of hours chipping away at it with the ice chipper and then using the snow blower to remove the chunks of ice from the driveway and street. I'm guessing the post office was down a few mail carriers today as the mail didn't come until 5 pm or so. Usually it's not later than Noon or so and it wasn't our normal carrier either.

After that I relaxed for a while and then we had dinner at Applebee's. Grace was really good there. She ate her meal and was good and was listening. That's even bigger considering we went so late. We didn't get home until after 8:30 which is after her bed time.

Tomorrow it's a birthday party for our nephew. After that I'll keep working on the family room...