Handywoman

Our son Travis loves it when Dad comes to town, because he knows lots of projects around the house will get done. Not because I know how to do much besides get underfoot, but because Dad brings Mom with him. And as her T-shirt says, if Terry can’t fix it, we’re all screwed.

Travis has an amazing green thumb, and he could grow vegetables in a garden planted in concrete, but unfortunately, he inherited my lack of competency involving anything mechanical. So when he can’t figure something out, it’s Mom to the rescue!

This trip it was assembling a kitchen island cart for Geli. Travis and I look at all those pieces and parts and start getting headaches, but to Terry it’s child’s play. Fun child’s play.

As I’ve said before, some men buy their wives jewelry or sexy negligees, but nothing gets Terry’s blood rushing more than power tools.

It took her a couple of hours to get it put together, but she did a great job, as always, and the cart looks great. More importantly, it will give Geli much-needed extra storage and counter space and even act as a breakfast bar if they want.

And as they say in the late-night television infomercials, “Wait, there’s more!”  Travis picked up this cool little wall cabinet at a thrift store for $3 and refinished it, and once she was finished with the kitchen cart, Terry used a stud finder to mount it on the wall for him. That lady can do anything!

Believe it or not, I was even able to be somewhat helpful on this trip. The other day we went to Lowes so Travis and Geli could buy a bunch of plywood and lumber for some other projects they have planned. Since they only have a small compact car, we picked up their supplies with our truck to save them a delivery fee. And my veteran’s discount saved them a few bucks, though as it turns out, the discount does not apply to wood. I never knew that.

I have said before that the internet signal here at their house is very poor and unreliable, so after doing a lot of research, Geli had ordered an Amazboost signal booster kit from Amazon.

This is something I was actually able to help with, since it looks and works exactly like the old We Boost signal booster we used during our days as fulltime RVers. In fact, I am sure it is the same product rebranded with Amazon’s name for it.

While Terry was working on the kitchen cart, I helped Travis get it up and running. First we mounted the outside antenna on a ten foot long piece of electrical conduit, then I used a signal finder app on my phone to find a signal from a cell tower a few miles away and we pointed the antenna in that direction. What a difference it made!

Our cell phones went from one bar of service to five bars of 5G and very fast speeds with the inside antenna and signal booster just sitting on the table. That is definitely going to make life easier for them.

We secured the conduit to the back porch railing with zip ties, and today we will go back to Lowes to get some longer coax cable since the thirty feet supplied with the kit isn’t quite enough to reach where Travis wants to mount the rest of the system inside the house. I guess the old man is at least somewhat useful now and then. Not nearly as handy as Mom, but enough to keep him around for a while longer anyway.

Thought For The Day – No one wants to hear about your diet. Just eat your salad and be sad.