It's definitely spring

This last week has been fairly normal. Monday was preschool story time at the library and Grace had a great time as usual. She just loves going there. I found out that there is another session after this one is over so I signed her up for that session in May so she'll have a week off and then start over for more story times. She was starting to get sick over the weekend and wasn't much better on Monday coughing a lot and just not feeling good. But of course if you ask her she felt fine.

Tuesday was preschool and she added sneezing to her repertoire of sickness symptoms. One of the hardest decisions I've found that as a parent you have to make is whether to take your child to the doctor. Not to say that sometimes it's obvious that you have to, but when it's a borderline sickness like this where it's basically a cold or maybe allergies, what good is a doctor visit except wasting money on your insurance deductible? Tuesday I chose to not go but rather to try and slow her down a little especially since on Wednesday she has dance class and gymnastics and she needs to be well rested for that.

Well with Grace, trying to slow her down is like trying to get your grass to grow during a drought without watering it. If you get her to slow down it isn't usually for long. She fights it -- which is actually good, she needs to be active but not when she's sick. So obviously she didn't rest much but she made it through the day. On Wednesday she was about the same but again made it through. So when Thursday came and she wasn't really any better I'm starting to think, take her to the doctor. So I ask Julie what she thinks and neither of us are sure whether to or not to take her there so again I don't take her.

Instead, I take her to school. Now just so you know I'm not a negligent parent, her symptoms aren't any worse, just not better. And she isn't exactly lying around not doing anything because she feels terrible, no she's up running around and complaining that she wants to play more is mad at me for trying to hold her back as I try to get her to rest since she has these symptoms. So anyway I take her to school and again she seems to be doing just fine except she's still coughing a lot and has a runny nose; the sneezing has pretty much gone away by now.

While she's in school, I run over to the in-laws house because my BIL has gotten a new (used) set-top box for DirecTV that needs to be installed since the box they had stopped working. I'm not sure if I mentioned this last week, but their old box died and so my BIL got a used box off of eBay and I went over to get it working for them. I called DirecTV and had them activate this box with the card we had ordered from them for $20 and had been using in the box that died. They didn't complain one bit and did exactly that, but this "new" box didn't work. So he ordered another one and had called me on either Tuesday or Wednesday to say the new one had come in and needed me to get this one activated.

So after I dropped Grace off at school on Thursday, I run over there and get everything ready and call DirecTV and the lady I got was completely the opposite of the person I had talked to the previous week. She can't activate this box with an old card, I need to order a new one. I'm saying that this is a card that I ordered from you for $20 and was just using a week ago AND that another representative had activated with another box just a few days ago. "I'm not supposed to do that sir," was the response I got. Well then why did this other representative do it? "I'm don't know why they would do that." Are you freaking kidding me? I'm just going crazy trying to comprehend why I'm being told this now and not last week. Why would different customer service rep's tell me completely different things only days apart? I know they don't like us buying used boxes on eBay because they want everyone to pay a monthly "rental" fee for leasing new boxes from them. They apparently don't want anyone to own equipment anymore.

So as I'm going crazy about this situation she says she's "noticed" that I qualify for a free upgrade to the new HD receiver and that she could also have it installed for free. And then I could use my old HD receiver (that I have currently disabled somehow with my whole wiring issue) that we're currently using on this TV and then we wouldn't have to order anything or pay for anything. So I agree to this and everything is OK now, but I don't get why talking to a different customer service rep provides different results. So we'll see what this install brings as far as getting the cable I couldn't get to work to start working. They are coming on Monday morning.

So after I cool off I go to get Grace and we had a pretty good day and we were finally able to go to bible study for a change this Thursday. The babysitter came over and since there were no cancellations for bible study we got to go. It was really good and as usual, it's always nice to get away without Grace for a little bit. It's nice to feel like an adult every once in a while. As far as bible study goes, it was very enlightening and enjoyable. We're studying the book of Peter or at least we're starting to now.

So on Friday I took our HD receiver to the in-laws house and got it set up and it worked just fine. I didn't need to wait until Monday because it doesn't work at our house anyway. So that made them happy. But since Grace still wasn't feeling much better, we canceled going back to their house Friday night for dinner because we don't want them getting sick. Today was my biggest day for feeling I "should" take her to the doctor mostly because she's not really any better and the weekend is coming up and if she ends up getting worse over the weekend our options will be limited as far as taking her to the doctor.

But again we decide not to take her as she hasn't gotten worse and she's really not "acting" sick at all, she just sounds sick. So we make it through Friday and then on Saturday Julie goes to yoga in the morning and Grace didn't really sleep in so the morning wasn't so good because she's never happy when it's the weekend and Mom isn't around. I actually think her coughing is a little better on Saturday, but she's now whining and complaining about everything, but of course still doesn't want to just sit around.

We had this painting company come over Saturday morning to give us an estimate for painting the outside of our house. The estimate was great and their references seemed really good and I've never heard anything bad about this company, so I'm 95% sure we'll go with them, but they aren't calling us to see what our decision is until Wednesday so we have a few days to decide still. Then Grace had a birthday party to go to; her friend from around the corner turned six so she went over there for several hours.

After that I finally got started on staining the new bookcase/toy box we bought Grace back in December when one of our favorite furniture stores was closing. They used to be called "Naked Furniture" and then they changed their name to "At Home Furniture." They sell unfinished furniture directly from the manufacturers. We bought a lot of Grace's bedroom furniture from there before she was born and we bought this piece to kind of go with that. It's not from the same collection as her dressers and night stand, but it is the same wood; ponderosa pine which we love. So anyway I was able to get the first coat finished and then Julie and Grace had gone to pick up dinner and they got back as I was finishing up. So then we had family movie night with dinner downstairs in the family room while watching "Air Bud: Spikes Back." Grace loved this movie. I think with this whole family movie night thing that Grace might finally be re-embracing movies again; we'll see.

So on Sunday we had church obviously and then later we went to a friends house for dinner. Julie was helping them make announcements for a family member whom had just had twins and Grace was playing with their kids and their Dad and I were hanging out watching sports and cooking, talking, etc. Everyone had a great time and hopefully we can continue to do things like that together.

So now it's Monday and this morning the DirecTV guys came over to install the new HD receiver down here in the family room. First thing, they were told they were upgrading, ie: replacing, an older box which they weren't. They were just installing the new box where the old one used to be. Once they figured that out they were pretty excited that all the wiring was already done. Except there was the little problem of it not working right, but I'll get to that in a minute. So they're scoping everything out and they start installing everything and they're wondering about all the wiring I've done but the guy that "got" to go up on the roof isn't having a great time because our roof is quite steep and he's not wanting to be left alone for fear of falling off the roof. He says if he falls he at least want someone to see him falling. I'm telling you these guys were really having fun and they made me laugh a lot.

So once the roof work was done; the new HD receivers provide more HD stations because they're accessing 2 additional satellites, so instead of "only" three satellites being brought in, it's now bringing in five satellite signals on the one "large" dish; they moved inside to determine how well everything inside the house was working. Not so well was the determination. Even the box up in our bedroom was not finding any signal so they started to work diagnosing the problem. I had already told them about how I had brought the line in to the attic from having been previously wrapped around the house and that ever since then the HD feed hadn't worked. It took them some time, but it was a couple of things. Something with a switch they installed and then the culprit for why the HD didn't work after I brought it into the attic. I feel like such an incapable coax cable installer after this one. It was completely my fault that this didn't work because when I brought that line that had been wrapped around the house into the attic and attached it to the cable that had been run down to the family room as the HD feed, I made a sloppy mistake/oversight on attaching the connector to the end of the cable.

How RG6 coax cabling works is it's got a central copper wire and then insulation and shielding around the outside where there is the stranded wire. When you use the stripping tool, it cuts the insulation off the very outside revealing the stranded wires and also trims the interior insulation to reveal the central copper wire. Once you put the connector on the end it covers the stranded wire so the only exposed wire remaining to the eye is the central copper wire. Well, there was one stray stranded wire that somehow got dislodged/disconnected from the rest of the stranded wires and was askew and when I put the connector on the end it was exposed on the outside of the connector and was touching (wrapped around even) the central copper wire which is obviously a BIG no-no. So it was this tiny little stray wire that caused all these problems. I've run how many hundred feet of this wire in my house and made many many of these connections and this had never happened to me before. So I can chalk this up to a learning experience because I certainly won't let that happen again.

Here is a picture of the culprit:


They were VERY impressed with all the wiring I had done and were especially excited at how easy everything was for them (except the whole connector issue.) So it took them some time, but they figured out my problem and everything works wonderfully. So for now everything is good in DirecTV-land and we're satisfied customers again. After this I told Grace that maybe we could ride our bikes to the library today since we needed to go to story time and it was such a nice day and gas prices are just out of control. But she ended up watching some show about organizing or something and wasn't ready to go until too late really because we drove and were still about 4 minutes late getting there. Next time we'll ride there...

When we got home from the library we had lunch and then were going to go for a bike ride, but I had mentioned to her that maybe we could take her training wheels off and see if she couldn't learn to ride her bike without the training wheels and she seems pretty excited about that. So we tried and she worked at it a bit, but I don't know all the right things to say and she wasn't really getting it I guess, so finally she just wanted her training wheels back on so that we could go for a bike ride. So we did that and she wanted to ride for like - ever. She wanted to go like 3 miles down the road to the new forest preserve but I stopped her from going that far and diverted her to the next subdivision and then surprisingly (not) and just as I predicted she was suddenly "so tired" and couldn't hardly go on, but we made it back home. I don't remember exactly, but I think we went close to 2 and a 1/4 miles in addition to the riding she had done earlier trying to ride without training wheels.

Then not long after we got back Julie was home and I hadn't prepared anything for dinner so we ended up going out for dinner which actually turned out to be a pretty enjoyable time. Grace is coughing considerably less now than she was and seems to be getting better. Unfortunately Julie isn't feeling very good now. She said when she got home that she should have called in sick today.

I've also been walking the dog each night now so that I can get some exercise and so that he can too, but mostly it really is for me. We've worked our way up to about 20-25 minutes now and I think we might have gone a little too much tonight because he got up to go to bed a looked REALLY stiff; poor guy. I'll see how he is in the morning. He seems so willing when we're actually walking...