Part of every trip home involves attacking the “to-do” list of things my mom can’t take care of by herself. She has several wonderful neighbors who do some more immediate things like plow and shovel her out when it snows (she mows their lawn in nicer weather on her riding mower), but other tasks can wait until one of the children visit. Wrangling the artificial tree from and back to the basement, lugging things to the attic, etc. are normal November/December/January chores.
But there were three bigger jobs. One neighbor has a very large generator that was put to use during the recent ice storm; our street only lost power briefly, but the houses behind us were on the wrong side of a fallen tree and were without power, and he supplied them with enough to run the heat and other basics. To facilitate hookup for the next power outage, he decided to shuffle some breakers in our house so he could backfeed through some outlets in the garage. So I helped a little with that.
The second job was to extend the recently-installed sump pump drain further away from the house; the original placement was on the high-elevation front side of the house, and only about 5′ away. The ground had become saturated and all of the water being dumped was just filtering back in to the basement. So I got to go down to the HO E DEPOT (the “M” was being replaced) and get some PVC pipe and run the drain line off to the side of the house, about 20′ away, and an area that will drain down the hill. There was snow on the ground, so I couldn’t do a proper job and bury the pipe, a task that will have to wait until better weather.
The last job was repairing the ancient pinball machine in the basement game room. It was a relic when we got it, about 35 years ago — relays and gears and a mechanical score display, which had gone out of vogue when digital displays and electronics came out. It hadn’t been looked at since my dad died, some 12 years ago, but hadn’t seen much use for a few years after that, until my nieces got old enough to want to play. By that time my mom had re-done some flooring upstairs and installed the old carpet in the game room, and it was some time later that we noticed that the key that opens the machine was missing, and was probably sitting on the floor, under the carpet and all of the junk laying on top. So, no access to the guts of the machine, until my mom had someone in to drill out the lock this past fall.
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