Honey(less)-do’s

With no Honey around the house (except a cute little dog), the only person to do the various small handyperson chores here at the Funny Farm is moi. Quite a few things have stacked up over the months…now that there’s time as well as energy to do them, w00t! Some of them are actually getting done!

One little improvement I’d like to make to the house, whenever I have a few extra dollars again, is to ask Dave the Electrician to install several electric outlets at waist level.

The custom of installing outlets down near the floor is something I’ve never been able to figure out. Even when your back doesn’t hurt every time you bend down, who wants to hunker on the floor to plug in the vacuum (over and over, if you have a big house!), the iron, the heating pad, the laptop? Ideally, I’d like to have at least one waist-height outlet in every room, but of course I can’t afford that. So I’ll have to make do with a few — one next to the bed, two in the office, one or two in the TV room, one in the living room.

At any rate, it’ll be awhile before this project gets done. In the meantime, I had a great idea: outlet strips!

Yeah! Some outlet strips have little holes in the the back that you can use to hang them up. Well, I don’t happen to have enough countersinks to do the  job right, with screws. But each outlet strip has four such slots for hang-up screws, so I tacked a bunch of sturdy nails into the drywall — or to the side of the old desk — and stuck the things up there.

In the office, alas, this entailed having to untangle the spaghetti of computer cables, lamp cords, telephone and Ethernet cables, speaker wires, and wires of unknown provenance that’s been growing like fungus under the furniture. Back in the day, I had them pretty well organized, having installed a row of cuphooks under the tabletop’s rim and strung the infrastructure under there. But when the Three Stooges were here screwing up the paint, they yanked out my tidy arrangement and made hash of it. Then they just shoved the desk and table, which are too heavy for me to move, back against the wall.

So it was an unbelievable mess under there. The dog would lose her ball in the briar patch and refuse to dig it out, so tangled were the wires, cords, and cables. Some of those wires, BTW, seemed to have no function…if they ever attached to anything, whatever it was apparently has dissolved into a dust bunny and been vacuumed away.

In the process, I finally figured out why the antique stereo in the office never worked after M’hijito reattached the wires: the Stooges had yanked its antenna out and then wound it up and jammed it back in behind the components in there. Ah! So obvious! Why did I never guess?

Speaking of things electronic, while vacuuming I happened to push the TV rabbit ears, which resided atop a wooden stool next to the TV armoire because they’re too tall to fit on top of it, back against the wall. Idly wondering what that would do to the reception, which has been touchy ever since Big Brother kindly made most broadcast TV stations inaccessible to the hoi polloi who can’t afford cable TV and wouldn’t pay for it even if they could. Turned on the boob tube, and lo! PBS came in bright, clear, and undistorted!

Naaahhh…. Couldn’t be.

Channel 12? Perfect!

How about 10? 3? 15? 5? All of them: clear, HD-ish, and free of snow, ghosts, and pixelation!

This was with the vacuum cleaner sitting there and me moving around the room, both such vast obstacles to modern-day reception as, in theory, to make viewing next to impossible.

Interesting.

I wondered what would happen if the antenna was directly behind the television, stashed behind the armoire. Had to pull the thing out from the wall a couple of inches, which was a trick with a trashed back. It must weigh 200 pounds.

Still worked, but not as well. Four stations were still good, but Channel 12 was scrambled and PBS disappeared. Then, as in one of those murky Magic Eight-Balls, two words surfaced:

aluminum

foil

Wrapped the southerly rabbit ear with tinfoil. Channel 12 came in; Channel 8 was still dark.

Wrapped the northerly rabbit ear in tinfoil. Channel 8 came in, clear as a bell.

EVERY station is now true HD — I mean, you can actually SEE the images! — and none of them break up when the dog runs past with Ball in her mouth. And the hideous contraption is hidden behind the furniture, no longer annoyingly visible to the naked eye.

This evening a cop helicopter was buzzing the neighborhood, and even that didn’t break up the picture. Amazing!

All of this evolved into a hell of a job for me. I hate handyman stuff…it always entails 87 gerjillion trips out to the garage to dig out and haul in tool after tool after tool. Had to break out the Gorilla Tape (a kind of duct tape on steroids) to secure a strange little black box (purpose: unknown; wires: connected to something) to the underside of the work table. Had to fool around interminably to get an old outlet strip to hang horizontally instead of vertically along the side of the desk. Straightening out the mess of wires was another time-consuming headache.

But ta-DAA! Now there are no wires on the floor! I can vacuum under the desk and table. Cassie is not lying in a nest of electric wires. I can plug in a heating pad next to the bed without having to crawl under the nightstand and tip over the lamp onto my head. And I’ll be able to plug in the recharging cables and the iron without having to dig through wires, dog hair, and dust to get at an outlet — and without having to climb around the floor for the privilege.

Much better. 🙂