Indeed, it is about time I wrote something on my blog. I have been severely reprimanded by my readers for being remiss. I see that the last time I had anything to say was in January. Well, that's not quite true. I've had plenty to say, but I just didn't write it down. So, where are we now? We are still in Webster, New York, where "Life is Worth Living." Sometimes it can be a little overdone. A local restaurant says it's the place where "The Food is Worth Eating." A wine store says. "Where the Wine is Worth Drinking." Anyway, it is nice here, but it's getting warm. People are walking around in shorts and short sleeve shirts. We may have to go to Canada in the Summer if this keeps up.
Most of the boxes are empty now. There is still only one car in the garage, but progress is being made there. There is a little creek, drainage ditch, rivulet or whatever it is running along the rear of our property . Our neighbor has created a small fish pond from it. There was a a little bridge across it on our property, but a large tree had fallen on it and crushed it. I was waiting for the tree guy to come back with his chain saws to cut it so I could move it, but he won't return until the trees are in leaf, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I got out my trusty ax and started chopping. The tree had partially rotted so it wasn't a real big deal, but I chopped enough so that I could swivel it off the bridge and out of the way. The bridge is still broken, but I was able to separate the two sections and Anne was busy getting the water to flow more smoothly. Not sure where the water is coming from, but moving water is better than stagnant water.
I usually find that trying to work on something where others have gone before is usually a troubling situation. So it was today when I decided to put a switch and outlet on a light post in our back yard. The light is rigged to a sensor to go on at dusk and off at dawn. There was no switch to turn it off, so I thought, "How much trouble can it be to put a switch on it and while I'm at it, an outlet?" I spent most of the day and two trips to Lowes to get it almost done. It works okay, but the cover on the thing doesn't close completely because the switch protrudes too much. You would think that the people that make the covers and the people that make the switches would talk to each other once in a while so that customers can keep their blood pressure under control.
We also have a number of low voltage lights in the front and rear of the house. There are three sets in the front. Two sets work, but the third doesn't. I know it worked when we bought the house, but for some reason some of the lights don't work now. I set out the reason for to know. I found that some of the wires were corroded, so I cut off the bad parts, stripped new wire, but without result. I also bought some new outdoor wire nuts. This is low voltage wire. There is no ground, so you need two wire nuts times the number of lights you want to connect. The nuts come in packages of five or packages of twenty. I needed a few more than five, but not twenty. I was so angry at the marketing flim-flam that I almost didn't buy them. But, I like so many of the rest of us succumbed. I should have gone to the store manager and loudly complained, but I didn't. I got two packs of five, still less than the cost of buying twenty, because I wanted to get on with my project. I fill up my car with $4.00 a gallon gas too because I want to get on with my business. The wire nut companies and the oil companies laugh. They are making plenty of money because I want to get on with my life and don't have the fortitude to stand up and say "I'm not going to take it anymore." "Oh, hum," the companies say, "Unless the rest of your 330 million countrymen stop buying wire nuts or stop filling their cars with gas, we really don't care."
This is only about half the bog that I wrote. I was getting an error message that it couldn't be saved. It didn't say why or what I could do about it and I carried on for a paragraph or so about the unfairness of it all and called on my readers, yes, both of you, to arise and take action. My ranting was quite good, I thought, but I can't remember exactly what I said and I don't care any more, so you can both sit back down now.
