Can you hear me now?

The little television set that's been sitting in the corner of the kitchen counter is now really an honest-to-goodness television set. It's plugged in, hooked up to the cable box, and when you push the "on" button on the remote, it really comes on.

Six months ago, when the set in the TV room was hooked up by the cable company, the guy who came out here told me he couldn't connect the small set in the kitchen because they weren't allowed to work in kitchens and bathrooms. Something about tiling and wiring and appliances. So the set just sat there, and I truly missed being able to turn on the morning news while I fixed breakfast, and I missed watching Oprah while I got dinner ready.

I had called in a handyman to look at some jobs around the house that needed to be done, and when I asked him about hooking up the TV in the kitchen, he stood there and rattled off a couple of names of guys he knew who would crawl underneath the house with the cable wire. That was the last we've heard from that particular handyman.

And the TV just sat there. A couple of weeks ago, my husband carried the little television into the TV room and sat it next to the big TV. Then he got busy with the wires, the remotes, the cable instruction booklet, and he made some calls to the cable company. They talked about connections, cable wiring, dual-remotes-- and "proof of concept." (Translation: my husband didn't want to start drilling a hole in the kitchen until he was certain that the small TV would truly work once he had the cable wiring connected to it.)

Yesterday was the day. Out came the drill. Out came the 100-ft. of cable wire. And out came the little doors leading to the crawl space underneath this old pier-and-beam house. You're going under there? In the dark? With the dirt and the spiders and the scorpions?

I told my husband we could put the little TV somewhere else, and the cable company would send a guy out here to connect it. "But you said you wanted this TV in the corner of the kitchen counter," he said. So what if I did? I can change my mind. Who needs to listen to the news first thing in the morning anyway?

My husband took it as a challenge. He was determined to hook up that little TV and not have to pay someone $100 to crawl underneath the house with the cable wire. So into the little trap-door he went... and then I had to put the door back so neither Gatsby nor the chickens would follow him in. As it was, the cat and chickens heard him talking to me from underneath the house and they were all standing as close to the trap-door as they could get. Can you just imagine how long it would have taken my husband to get them out of there if they had indeed followed him underneath the house?

So while my husband was down there crawling in the dirt, I was up on the porch, talking to him and tapping my foot on the wooden boards so he would know which direction he needed to be going in. (Can you hear me now? You're right near the breakfast room door.)

As he crawled from one end of the house to the other (and wouldn't you know that the original cable hook-up is all the way at the other end of the house from where the kitchen TV would be set up) I listened to his progress by focusing on the grunts and groans coming from underneath the boards of the porch. At one point, I asked my husband if he wanted me to start singing "Under The Boardwalk...." (Then we got to talking that no one in the south would understand that song.)

After an hour or so, and after having to crawl through not only the trap-door underneath the kitchen-part of the house, but also having to crawl through an even smaller opening underneath the TV room, my husband came out covered in dirt from head to toe, but with a smile on his face. In his best Jim Carrey imitation, my husband said "Cable guy!"

As happy as I was to finally have the kitchen TV working again, I wouldn't let my husband go into the house for a shower until he changed clothes first-- in the garage. Then I shook out the under-the-house clothes, then stepped all over them to make sure any spiders or scorpions that may have hitched a ride were smashed before the clothes were put into the washing machine. (Believe it or not, there wasn't a spider or a scorpion -- not even an ant -- on those clothes.)