The Straw House Blog

What happened Wednesday

I knew things were going too smoothly with Bell. But we’ll get to that.

Pete and Tina were in the house again, and I was helping them out with the stucco. We completed the living room wall and fixed cracks on some of the others. Tina spent some time scraping stucco off the posts and beams, they have a special tool that seems to be made for just that task.

Dad worked on the conduit, and we ran some cable from the mechanical room up across the back and through to the front part of the house. So we have all of the phone and electrical wire run around most of the front part of the house. Once we have a working phone line we’ll start connecting the various jacks. We’ve strung Cat-5 networking cable along the outer perimeter as well, but it is my intention to use 802.11 for my main networking needs.

So everybody left around 4:30pm, but I had to hang around because Bell was supposed to come and hook up my phone lines. I waited until 5:30pm and then I went back to my parents. No sooner had I sat down and started into my email than my cel rang. Of course it was the tech, and of course he wanted me to meet him at the house. So back I went, with some reheated lasagna and my book.

By 7:30pm there was still no sign of the tech, so I drove out to the road to look for him. I found him at the main box for the line, cursing. Seems there was no dial-tone and he couldn’t get a test pulse from our road box to the line box. That was the result of mis-numbering. With that resolved he had to wire from the road box to the house. They’d already run a line in alongside the driveway with 5 test boxes. The line had to be connected from box to box and then connected to the house. By the time he had wired the line from box to box to the house it was 9:00pm. He finally left at 10:00am, and I still didn’t have a dial tone. He said to call if I didn’t have a dial-tone by 2pm Thursday.