More work in the house

I spent the first half of the day with my mom, mostly taking care of social security stuff.  On the upside, we did the paperwork so that SSA recognizes me as her authorized representative, so in the future I can call them to talk about her case without having to have my mom right there with me.  We also got her replacement card ordered with her correct name (the one she had still had her former married name), and figured out the problem with medicare (she should have been given medicare parts  A and B retroactively to November of '04, but they had started her in August of '05 instead).  So she'll get the retroactive medicare and be able to have several medical bills covered, adding up to over $7,000 in bills.  That's good.  On the downside, it appears that the payment she got in October really was the entire settlement amount.  We had been of the understanding that there was a second piece following, and that the lawyer had not been paid yet.  That appears to not be the case.  There is still some confusion, however, because an awards letter was never generated to itemize the back payement.  We should have it all straightened out in January.

For the afternoon, Kris and I went up to the house.  Kris had a nice chandelier that had been a housewarming gift from her condo, and I installed it in the formal dining room.  It looks very nice.  We also got a new light fixture to put in the downstairs hallway, since the existing one was missing the glass dome and was ugly to boot.  The one we got was twenty five bucks, was much more in scale with the space, and looks very nice.  We also replaced some switch cover plates in the dining room.  All of the outlets in there are going to need to be replaced, as the former owners had done a very sloppy job painting and had not bothered to cover the outlets.  Truth be told, we are going to need to just walk through the entire house and take an inventory of every light switch, outlet, and other panels that need to be replaced.  All total it's not that expensive, and it will make a huge difference.

The only downer to the day:  our Tivo is dead.  It locked up a few days ago and I was able to revive it, but it failied again today.  It is exhibiting the classic signs of hard drive failure.  So everything we had saved on it is pretty much gone, which kind of sucks.  But I have a recovery CD so all I really need to do to fix it is to buy a new hard drive and then blast the image onto it.  A pain in the butt, but at least it waited to fail until everything we watch was in reruns during the Christmas break.