In case I didn't know I was getting old, my body reminded me of that this past weekend.
On Sunday, with the weather finally settled into a more traditional October sunny day, I decided I was going to work on my outside antenna a bit.
Now, to set the scene properly, I'd already planned on driving a ground rod into the side of the house where the antenna would reside, and I bought some 6 gauge solid copper ground wire to bond it to a ground rod on the back of the house. I'm eventually going to bond it to the house ground on the south side of the house, but unfortunately the fiberoptic cable that brings my internet (and phone service) into the house happened to have been run right on top of where the ground rod lay buried underground.
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The PVC pipe for the fiber line is on the left, the one for
electrical is on the right, and in the middle is an oxidized
ground line that connects directly to the ground rod
(buried) directly beneath it. |
Sometimes you can't make this stuff up.
Anyway, I decided I'll deal with that house ground another day, but I could bond the two other grounds together this past Sunday.
To do that, I needed to run the ground wire along the edge of the house, under the deck and the raised porch, and then I could use the clamps I'd bought at Lowe's to finish the job.
Easy peasy, right?
It may sound easy, but that involved me crawling around under the deck and the porch for upwards of an hour.
The amount of vertical space I had to work with was between 2 to 3 feet (2/3 to 1 meter), and most of that large end was under the porch section, where ironically enough most of the rocks strewn about the ground were as well.
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| I hope you're not claustrophobic. |
So I didn't really have a lot of room to move over things, such as the PVC pipe there that redirects the sump pump from simply emptying out there under the deck* to a spot beyond the deck. I could have brought a screwdriver with me to disconnect the pipe and remove it, but to be honest that was going to be more trouble than it was worth.
When I snuck under there, I quickly discovered it was still damp. The right side of my clothes were soaked before I'd gotten very far --I'm a lefty, so my right side was on the ground-- and then to avoid the pair of center beams I had to crawl to the left and then up toward where the wire had gotten stuck.
No, I did not bring a smartphone while I was under the deck; the rocks would have destroyed it.
I was able to free up the wire and shoved it forward to where it then reached the porch portion, and I had to exit and then head up that way.
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Sure, I love rocks, but this is a bit much. Plus it's broken
pieces of concrete, so likely from a slab that was once
here. Just a guess, but given what I saw probably accurate. |
If I thought the rocks I'd climbed over on the deck portion hurt, the porch side said "Hold my beer."
Also, I found some very unusual items there under the porch:
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| Trust me, they're there. |
The item on the left is the remains of a small individual-sized yogurt cup which you can make out fairly well, but the one on the right... I began crawling closer and I thought "That CAN'T be what I think it is, right?" Oh yes, it was: a suction cup attachment for a breast pump, complete with the screw top connection for a baby bottle.
Okay, both of those items point to a family with really little kids, but how did they get under here? When our kids were little you couldn't even get under the deck because the skirting blocked any access, and the porch floor is tongue-and-groove, so you can't accidentally drop these items to the ground. So either a critter pulled those items under there, or they were dropped there during the construction of the porch itself.
When I told my wife later what I'd found, she disputed the breast pump suction cup, saying it had to be something else. "A lot of things use suction cups," she insisted.
"Just how many have the screw tops for a baby bottle?" I countered. "And believe me, with three kids around here I know what the breast pump cup looks like."
She had nothing to say to that.
Anyway, once I got the wire pulled through to the far side I was able to connect the wire to the ground rods.
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Here's the new one, hidden behind
a row of burning bushes. |
That was a lot harder than I expected. Being in your mid-to-upper 50s and trying to crawl under a tight space like that like I was 30 years younger was probably not the smartest thing I've done, but it is finally finished for now.
I woke up Monday morning feeling like I'd been run over by a truck. No amount of coffee or Tylenol could help with that, so I was a wee bit grumpy when I started work. Still, a very necessary part of antenna work was completed, and I won't have to crawl under the deck for a while.**
The next step is to simply wait for the roof to be replaced and then I'll proceed from there. Unfortunately, it might not be until Spring before I finally get an antenna up outside, but we'll see.
*Yes, when we first moved into the house I had no idea where the sump pump exited, and then on the first big rain it became quite obvious that it was just being dumped right under the porch itself. "Hell no," was my reaction, and I redirected it out to farther away under the deck, and I have since extended it to beyond the deck itself. That little indentation you see on the ground in the first photo is where the sump pump exited after my first "fix". 15 years created that little mini-valley where the dirt had washed away.
**Note that I didn't say "never". I know better.
EtA: Corrected grammar.
EtA: Also corrected that this was to be posted on Tuesday, not Monday. (Monday is for Meme Mondays.)
