jay | My weekend...

Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in some Pleasantville-equivalent, a place Where Nothing Ever Happens -- while other people I know are out having adventures. Boring, stable, vanilla suburbia. Main Street -r- us. Maybe it is simply having kids and a household to maintain, maybe it is middle age, maybe it is that I have few close friends (and those tend to live far away). Whatever...

After arriving home late Friday... the house was scattered with toys, but at least Pat left the door unlocked so I could slip in without knocking. She got out of bed and spent a half hour describing the Winter Olympic opening ceremonies (not that I was interested, per se, but she hadn't had an adult to speak with all week and needed to vent).

Saturday, I let Pat sleep in while I fed the kids, played with them and unpacked. I played Pokemon card games and Battleship, defeating David (7), 5 ships to 4. Around noon, Pat roused and then headed to Pescadero and the beach with James (11), ostensibly to buy bread at Archangeli's bakery but in reality an excuse to put down the convertible top -- it was beautiful and mild. I read my LJ friends list and answered the easier pending e-mails.

I watched the two younger kids while sitting by the phone (in case an out-of-town friend who was in the area this weekend decided to call) and in the meantime worked on finishing the home low-voltage wiring project. The remaining Ethernet cables were terminated in a 110-type patch panel, and the 11 phone lines in another one. Continuity testing showed that James's bedroom network connection wasn't working, so I spent an hour taking the wall fixture and jack apart (loose wire). Pat had returned by late afternoon and made my favorite food (prawns, stuffed baked potatoes, etc.) as a welcome-home after being away all last week. That was sweet of her :-) Then it was time to bathe the two smaller kids and put them to bed. Pat retired soon afterward, around 9:30pm. I spent a couple of hours cleaning the kitchen, then wandered around online (no one was available for chat), and finally read part of "The Curse of Chalion" by Bujold until about 3:30am.

Sunday morning I slept in, until almost 8am... then hurriedly got breakfast for the kids, hectored them to get dressed, and bundled them off to church with Pat. Then I cleaned up, dressed and followed them. In the afternoon, I made lunch for the kids, then took them to a nearby park, practicing baseball with James until about 2:30pm. (No phone calls, so I decided ito go out) I dropped them back with Pat and went to Fry's Electronics and bought a palm-sized 8-port Ethernet switch and more patch cables and jacks. As well as a min-jack-to-RCA adapter so I can feed audio from my laptop into our house amplifier.

Then I got my haircut, at my favorite barber shop... one of those old-style male retreats with a striped pole and sports posters on the wall. Got shorn, down to 1/4" all over (#5 razor cut) including the beard. Going home, Pat didn't notice the drastic change.

So I installed the switch and cables, stopping for dinner, kid-wrangling and a phone call from Barbara (yay!). Now my house has 9 functional 100Base-T wall jacks, 11 functional phone jacks, and 9 RF video connections. And it all works. File transfers within the house are blazingly fast... lacking anything else to do (Pat was in bed early, again) I played around with metrics and timing. Then read awhile longer, checked e-mail and chat (nothing, again), sent a message to a local friend (pledging to project towards zir whatever level of closeness zie wanted, as long as zie wouldn't run away), read for an hour or two, and went to bed by 1:30am.

Not exactly exciting, is it?