Another busy day at the old homestead... but first, last night: Mom and I ate at Western Sizzlin', then we went to Lowes and got a turntable for her TV. Now she can watch it from any of three rooms...
Then I went to bed... this was about 18:30 or so, I don't really remember. Actually, I took a nice long hot bath first, then I went right to sleep. Slept until 03:00 and then I was done, I guess... couldn't get back to sleep.
So I got up and finished up the last Harry Potter book, The Goblet of Fire. Pretty good series, I'm waiting for the next one. Anyway, Mom got up earlier than she wanted to, I think, about 06:00.
She had a doctor appointment at 10:00, going over the blood work she had done recently; she's doing fine there.
Cold here... brisk north wind putting the wind chill down pretty low earlier, but it's died down now.
Anyway, after Mom's appointment, we went to Kentucky Fried and had their buffet... pretty good food relatively cheap. We got home and I started to work and Mom took a nap... well, she tried, but I kept bugging her for tools that I couldn't find....
My first project was removing the phone cord that I had strung between her dining room and the room that the computer's in. I had patched together some cords as a "temporary" expediency several years ago. Anyway, I had mom get the drill out before she napped. I didn't want to wake her up with drilling through the floor, though, and I didn't really want to move furniture around and mess up the carpet. I did a thourough survey from the (partial, dirt-floor) basement, and I noticed a cork in the floorboard close to where I wanted to run the line. I got out the pocket-knife and made short work of the old cork, which was plugging a hole in the floor three inches from where I was planning on drilling.
So I poked a hole through the carpet with a coat-hanger and checked... yep, it was on the right side of the wall. So my job was half-way done...
I decided to inspect the area for the other hole. I noticed that the baseboard was scuffed up a little bit about a foot from where I was planning on drilling, so I probed around through the carpet and found a hole! Man, did I ever get lucky. I widened the hole a little but with my knife and started poking wire down it.
Back in the basement, I noticed that the wire had spilled into the crawl space, but I really didn't want to crawl... but there's a lot of junk in mom's basement, and I attached the coat hanger onto a four-foot dowel rod and pulled the wire out without having to crawl on my belly. Threaded the wire along the pipes and wires already there, then forced it up through the cork-hole and through the carpet.
I was going to do a professional job, going into the box and mounting a box on the other wall, but I got lazy and just crimped some connectors on both ends. Works, and I didn't have to pull a very heavy buffet away from the wall to do it.
Later on, I covered the air conditioner with plastic, so now mom is set for the winter.
O'yeah, the damned oven isn't working right. And Maytag (yeah, I said it was an Admiral, I was wrong) doesn't have any info on their web site for that model. I emailed them but not expecting to have much luck...
I was planning on spending this evening with my old buddy Jesse Roach, but I decided that I was really too tired, I'll just go to bed early and get up and head back to Topeka fairly early... more tomorrow from Topeka.