Radio Shack Attacked

Today Lucie and Ashleigh headed off to camp with about 40 other kids plus chaperones. They will be gone till Friday. Elliott and I have a list of fun stuff to do for the week (racquetball, cashing in free mini-golf coupons, ping pong, etc.) and one project which we tackled today. Well, mostly I tackled it because Elliott was at the church for a game day. Anyway, I wanted to run an Internet ethernet cable to the attic and drop it down into Elliott's room so he can be hard wired online for his Xbox. So I went up to the 1,000 degree attic and found that my drop hole was already too full of other cable and phone lines. So I drilled it out (carefully so as to not nick the existing wires) and dropped down two cables to connect to the router in the computer room - one for his room and one to leave coiled up there in case I want to drop it down into another room later. Of course the jack hole in the computer room is behind the two ton desk so I had to stretch and try to reach the cables. And couldn't. So back up to the attic I go to feed more cable. Finally I got them and got them plugged into the router. So far so good. Coiled up one line and pounded in a nail in the attic and hung the coil. Then I stretched the other one across the attic and had to get down on my stomach in the middle of the fiberglass and drop that line down into Elliott's closet ceiling. That worked fine. Went down to his room and had to connect that line to another ethernet line. Plugged it into his Xbox and there was no signal. Sure enough, the Radio Shack connector was no good. We tested the cables and they were fine but the connector wasn't working. So I had to dry off and change clothes and go to another Radio Shack for another connector. Got one and lo and behold if it doesn't look different than the first one! Same package, different item (looked similar). Plugged the new one in and all was good! Looked a little closer at the packaging on the first one and saw it had been previously opened! So someone returned something in the package I bought but it wasn't what I wanted! It's all good now and Elliott is playing faster than ever.

Now to shower off the fiberglass and settle in to watch Pearl Harbor. Elliott always falls asleep when we try and watch it but this time he swears he can make it through.

Yesterday we had a good day at a couple of church fundraisers (pizza and water ice). Even managed to sneak in a pool side nap...