Moving Closer to Having Television

Time to start terminating some of our cable, because I’m having drywallers come in next week to drywall the bath ceiling and garage wall, and I’d like to move our cable modem to a Safe location where it won't become cemented in joint compound.




Westlake Electronic hooked me up with SNS connectors (the coax ends) and a Thomas&Betts combination coax stripper/crimper tool. HomeTech Solutions has a great site showing how to crimp.



It really was quite easy, and worked on my first try, although I had a moment of panic when the cable modem worked, but the wireless router didn’t. After an hour or so of frantic diagnostics, I realized that the cable company had given me a 1 GHz splitter. Replacing this with a 2 GHz splitter did the trick.

I've also crimped the location closest to the TV, so if we should do something drastic, like subscribe to cable,
we could actually see it.


The book Sunset Wiring Home Networks was a rather helpful resource, available of course from Amazon.com, or from the Seattle Public Library after I return it.

Finally A Garage Wall

Carpenter Jim has framed in our new garage wall, and I've put up my new Fave - JM encapsulated insulation.

Fire Door is of course from Frank's The Door Store.

The Raspberry Crop

On the back of our lot, Dorothy planted a long row of raspberries, which have not yet succumbed to my Black Thumb of Garden Death, so we have quite a Crop to use. I’ve been collecting about 4 cups/day, which is a lot of berries for two people to use without turning into a big Raspberry.

I tried making a raspberry pie, which was quite disappointing really as it just tasted like a Generic Berry Pie, rather than preserving the flavor of the raspberries. I've been bringing berries to every summer gathering, foisting them off on friends, even having my parents U-Pick. And still they keep coming.

I’ve been taught the cookie sheet trick of freezing berries – line the berries up individually, unwashed, on a cookie sheet, cover with aluminum foil, let sit overnight in the Ginormous Freezer, then remove the berries from the cookie sheet and put them in a plastic freezer bag. This way one can thaw out a few berries at a time, rather than one Unified Blob of Berries.