Back in Livingston. Beautiful day, no plans.  While reading the NYTimes and wondering how the Israelis will put together a government this time and how long it will last, watching Hillary speak to the Senate hearing, I thought about projects that have been put off indefinitely it seems.  Back in November at Dan and Malena’s I had jury rigged the electrical setup for the macerator pump with wires running around door posts in the basement and held in place, not very well, with grey tape.  All in all an ugly arrangement, but who wants to crawl around on the ground and in the storage compartments when it is cold and wet?  Certainly not me.  As the morning fog lifted and the sun started to warm things up I started opening some compartments and sizing up what needed to be done.  For starters I dealt with the ground which didn’t need to be routed out of the utility compartment because there are plenty of good ground points available.  I thought of reducing the length of the wire but found that with tie wraps and some judicious wrapping of the wire I could keep the length and make it neat.  Done.

Next I needed to reroute the positive lead.  Just the other side of the utility compartment wall in the storage compartment is the inverter,  mounted to the ceiling.  A large gauge cable from the battery compartment feeds the inverter.  Just need to get a 10 gauge wire through the wall and it is done, well almost.  I crawled in on my back and found a tiny hole very near the exterior wall right at the top of the  storage compartment.  I shoved a piece of wire through and Carol announced she saw it coming into the utility compartment.  I measured out how long the finished wire needed to be and allowed some slack and made the cut and tied it to the wire I had used for a fish and with some struggle pulled it through.  I used a lot of tie wraps to secure the wire neatly and bound it to the post with the battery cable – I used a crimped on ring and retained the inline fuse that was part of the original installation.  Turned all the power back on and tried the macerator.  It works.  I think it was harder describing it than doing it.

We took off earlyish on Thursday to go to the Museum of Fine Art Houston.  We wanted to see the War/Photography Exhibit curated by Ann Tucker a graduate of VSW.  She spent eight years curating the exhibit.  Photographs range from before the Civil War to current conflicts and reflect all the aspects of war.  We spent all of three hours in the exhibit and were totally spent at the end.  While having lunch in the Cafe we both realized that we would not be able to take in any more art exhibits that day.

 I remembered that we had just read an article by Anna Lee Braunstein, with whom we have traveled, about the Space Center just south of Houston.  We headed out further south by 30 minutes to see what she had written about.  With only a few hours we could not fit in much of the extras, but we were able to get on the Tour Tram and get into Mission Control, the room we saw on TV through Apollo and the Shuttle until 1995.  It has been declared a National Historical Monument.  It almost brought tears to my eyes.  I remember getting up early and staying up late to watch launches and moon landings with continual views on screen of that room and the big screen with orbital lines on it.  Someplace I have slides I took off the TV when Armstrong took his famous step. The rest was very interesting, especially the training facility.  The rocket park is a let down, but then Houston was the control center and they never launched a rocket from there.

We headed out at five o’clock to thread our way through the heart of Huoston rush hour, please, after LA this was child’s play.  We only crawled three or four miles and once we started moving out of the center it was speed limit all the way home.  Of course we did take the HOV lane for 50 miles, what a blessing.

I’ll post some pictures another day.