The wired connection on my father-in-law's network came back up for a while, and then dropped suddenly again. Darn intermittent errors. Lisa says there's an access panel to the under-floor wiring conduit and that she'll see about working on it tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm going to set up this new drive to clone the existing one and head back "home" for the night.
Pity we didn't get any pictures of the place all covered in snow before it turned back into rain and turned a pretty covering of snow into dirty slush.