The good Doctor had a variety of phone lines installed over the years, from old four-wire copper to newer Cat 5 eight-wire stuff; as the phone contractor put new stuff in, they just left the old stuff up in the rafters. There’s a mixture of new plastic “network interface boxes” and ancient steel panels with old-school copper nut fasteners. Throughout the house, there are a numbing array of connectors for the phones—all of which don’t work. Currently in order to get online we have to stand in the basement stairwell, plug Jen’s laptop into the test panel for the working phone line, and balance on the stair and windowsill while we type (thank god for laptops.) The good thing is that we’re basing the networking off Airport, so with the exception of the server(s), everything will be wireless, and there’s clean signal all the way out to the greenhouse.

Last night I spent about fifteen minutes attempting to troubleshoot one line to try and put a phone line somewhere inside the main house, and had to give up. In my wake I ripped about eight lines out which started nowhere and ended up noplace. I can see this is going to be only the beginning of a long process (the electrical lines in this house vary from Roosevelt-era post and wire to some new and creative uses of Romex.) Big fun.

For all the folks who thought that our cats were going to draw knives and massacre each other, you needn’t worry. Jen found her cat Sage laying right up next to my cat Penn, each oblivious to each other.