Summary:
Day 1
Brave attic. Traverse Vaulted Pass with 1×3′ gap. Ninja skills. Begin hole drilling in wall header. Battery dies half inch in. Try spinning drill bit by hand, quickly love hate drill for efficiency and lack of juice. Leave tools there. Ninja skills employed to get out of 1×3′ gap up Vaulted Pass. Splinters, shinners, awkward positions, fiberglass insulation avoidance, sweat, bleed, itch. Finish project another day.

Day 2
Brave attic, still sore from last time. Traverse Vaulted Pass. Juggle battery, flashlight. Master 1×3′ gap. Total Ninja. Continue drilling. Consider giving up 1.5" in. Pop through header at 2". Hole drilled. Peer in hole, discover 8 feet of insulation between you and outlet below. Totally bum out. Realize all efforts are futile.

Plan B:
Poke wires through drywall ceiling. Plan to embed later, hide all blemishes. Take great pains to put wire in precise locations. Employ Ninja skills with added difficulty of pulling tools up super steep Vaulted Pass and narrow 1×3′ gap. Grunt, sweat, bump head on nail, splinters, shinners, awkward positions, cough, growl. Vow never to do that again.

Results:
Rear surround speakers and wiring. Perfect.
Front surround speakers and wiring. Total disaster – I missed the speaker locations by at least two feet. I was tricked by bizarre home construction. My office has a flat face to it, with the peak of the roof on the center of the office. In the attic, the rafters slope down, as if I have a sloped roof going down to the edge of the top of my office, complete with plywood indicating a roof. As it turns out, that totally threw me off, because where I thought the edge of my office was instead was where this fake roof intersected the ceiling of my office. It’s still a mystery to me why this fake roof exists, but now I have speaker wires in the wrong place and I’m never going back up there, ever.