It was five o'clock by the time I finished working on the hedge.
So far I have trimmed the sides facing the house and the top.
If I have time, I will trim the back side also,
but that obviously is not so important.
I also cleaned out the gutters where I could reach them
with Herman's aluminum ladder.
I am not stong enough to manage the big wooden ladders,
even with Mommy's help, so I have to leave the
gutter cleaning above the garage doors to Ronald Reagan,
whom I will telephone tomorrow or Monday.
While I was up on the ladder, I saw how badly the old roof
which has not been replaced is disintegrating.
Actually what blocked the gutters was not leaves
but debris from the fragmented shingles,
and I plan to get the roof not yet replaced,
which is about 80 percent of the entirety,
reshignled when we are back in two months.
I also found some badly decayed wood
over the dining room windows,
which will have to be replaced.
The lower branches of the balsam trees in
front of the dining room have so encroached on the lawn,
that there is now no place to position a ladder to get to the roof,
and I can't expect any roofer to take me seriously
until those branches at least are trimmed.
We have spoken about this, and I expect to start 
removing some of the branches tomorrow,
if I can get the chain saw started.
Don't worrt about my getting hurt.
I will be very careful.
.sp
I talked to Margrit on the telephone about Jeane's
suggestion that the Fuerstenberg china be packed up
to secure it from vandalism. 
I explained that you agreed with that suggestion,
that Mommy was non-committal, and that I did not think
packing the china was necessarily a good idea.
I explained, that, in the first place,
I thought unless meticulously packed in rigid boxes
with much padding, the china was likely to be injured,
and that even then,
one could not predict how the gold leaf would
hold up in contact with paper or plastic under fluctuating humidity.
I explained further, that if the house were vandalized,
much more than the china would likely be destroyed,
and we would be confronted with the task of refurnishing the house
in a more practical style,
and the loss of the china would be a minor matter.
We might even be too discouraged
for any futher investment in the house.
Margrit listened politely to these consideration,
and concluded by saying that she thought we should pack the china
because we really ought sometime to do what Jeane wished,
and that she, Margrit, would use the china one last time when she
was here at Christmas, would pack it herself in some tissue paper that
she would bring for the purpose from Windsor,
after which we could take the china to Belmont.
If my mother were giving this report,
she would now conclude with the interjection,
"und nun kommst Du!"
I asked Margrit to discuss her wishes with you,
and that I would do whatever you and she wished.
So I suppose she will telephone you about the matter sometime,
and I advise you to save some humor and forbearance for that occasion.
.sp
After I had my shower, I went to work on the modem problem.
I tried all combinations of intitializing strings
and found what I had noted before,
but never bothered to interpret,
that the instructions which represent the commands
as independent, are in fact misleading,
If S0=0, the modem will not answer the phone,
and if one sets S0=1, then &Cis automatically set to 1;
and if one then sets &C to 0, S0 is also set to 0.
The same was true of &D.
.sp
I concluded that the manufacturers are neither candid nor serious
with their documentation; and that these modems in fact would not
generate a carrier tone while connected to an active RS-232 circuit.
So then I decided to take the bull by the horns,
or the modem by the innards, and modify the hardware.
I reasoned that if I could make things work
by manually connecting the satellite after the carrier tones
had been established, I should try to accomplish the same automatically.
I checked all of the modem output lines,
to see whether any of them changed polarity
when carrier connection was established, but none did.
However, I noted one of the indicator lights, "CD",
carrier detect, turned on at that instant,
and I thought that if I could use that voltage
to close a relay, I might get the modem to do what I wanted.
However, the voltage across the LED was only two volts,
the lowest relay sold by Radio Shack is denominated at 5 volts.
When I looked at the circuit board, I saw that the diode voltage
was reduced by a resistor, on the other side of which
I could get the 5 volts I needed.
In my tool box, however, I had only a twelve volt relay;
I calibrated this and found that it closed even at 5 volts.
So much the better. A twelve volt relay will have a higher
resistance and draw less current.
I soldered a single filament of a braided wire to each
of the two spots on the circuit board,
put the armature of the relay in series with RS-232 pin 2,
and so far, after about a dozen tries,
the modem has not failed once to answer
and to make a proper connection.
It seems too good to be true.
Tomorrow I will find out which of the other boards
in the computer, if any, have been damaged by lightning.
.sp
Presumably we will speak tomorrow afternoon
or evening on the phone.
I hope you don't have to work too hard.