Doing it myself

In the weeks since Mrs. Blog has arrived in Abu Dhabi, I have become intimately familiar with all the various Ikea fasteners.

But there have been many other things to take care of besides furniture assembly. I have installed lights, removed shelves, hung mirrors and configured routers. But this week saw the completion of two of the most challenging UAE endeavors this side of Yas Island: The hanging—and wiring!—of two massive Arabic lanterns in the living room and the wiring of an Ethernet connection in the home office.

The lanterns are a big deal because they are heavy, brass and fitted with a convenient head-impaler on the bottom. They’re also antiques, so the light inside is nothing more than a naked bulb on a cord, which I spliced into the junction box. (there were no wire nuts to be found on the island, however, but that’s another story.) The hanging hook went neatly through a cover plate, and, well, see for yourself:

The living room is now 33 percent better lighted; my ego is now approximately 100 percent larger.

Meanwhile, our concrete walls, though solid, prevent a good wireless signal from reaching the back room. That means the home office is occasionally a barren, Internet-free wasteland… a problem when one is, say, working from home and connecting to an office on another continent.

The solution: digging a cable out of the wall—it turns out all the rooms were wired, but they only bothered to install jacks in the living room—and crimping a connector onto it. Several hours, a newly purchased crimping tool and a set of Internet instructions on Cat 6 four-pair pinouts later, this was the scene:

Yeah, the second chairs was probably extraneous.

What you can’t see is the newly activated wireless router in the office, which is happily pumping bandwidth. And although my Arabic skills have barely advanced during my time here, I can definitely say I have become more handy. Which I don’t know how to say in Arabic.