I finally got my home theater all hooked up this weekend. Everything, that is, except for getting the speakers mounted. Right now they’re all hooked up (with the old speaker wire I already had) and sitting on top of the entertainment center so you can at least hear them.

I’ve talked to a few installers and all of them give me the impression that wiring an exterior wall, while technically possible, is troublesome at best. They have flexible drill bits that you can use to drill down into the wall; they have fiber fish kits to fish wires up through the holes, but in order to get the holes reasonably drilled they’re still going to have to open up my wall in a few places which means I’d end up with certain spots with wall texture that doesn’t quite match up (it’s really, really hard to match wall texture).

To that end, I’ve bought some speaker stands for the rear speakers, which alleviate the need for me to actually drill into the exterior wall. They’ll work just fine. We’ll end up having to put up some plants or end tables or something to make the room flow a little better, but we were going to have to do that anyway.

I went on a mission on Sunday to find a couple of cables (I needed two optical audio fiber cables 12 ft. long and a composite video/stereo audio cable 12 ft. long) to finish the hook-up job. Let me tell you - nothing is open on Easter. Ridiculous. What about all the people who don’t celebrate Easter? What are they supposed to do? (Yes, I celebrate Easter, but that’s not the point.) Thank goodness for The Good Guys and Fred Meyer. Between the two of those places, I found the cables I needed and got the system hooked up.

In other home-related news, I got my barbecue put back together (so we had some burgers) and I got my computer and cable modem running. Everything network in the house is wireless because there’s no cable outlet in the office and I didn’t want the cable company drilling through my vinyl siding. The wireless isn’t a bad thing, but if I ever need to configure my router or cable modem directly, I’ve gotta truck the computer up the stairs to hook it up directly to the devices. Small price to pay, I guess.

Dealt with my first pest problem yesterday. We had these ants in the driveway and the backyard that got a shot of Raid. So many ants it looked like moving dirt piles. When Raid says it kills on contact, they’re not lying. Those things stopped moving instantly. I should probably sweep that mess up when I get home. There are a ton of dead ant carcasses lying about. How untidy.

I have some pictures from the move, but I haven’t gotten them downloaded to a computer yet. I’ll see if I can find some time soon to do that. It’s been a busy couple of weeks lately and there’s still more to do. We’re only about half unpacked.