A little bit of catching up...

We're mired in that seemingly interminable process of painting, installing, filling, sanding, filling, sanding, painting, and painting the trim in my office, and none of it looks all that impressive. It also, as I may have intimated, takes FOREVER.

So I thought I'd use this post to catch up on a mixture of things that have been going on around the house and in the neighbourhood. Not really sure what I'll wind up including, but hey - you get what you pay for with this blog.

Let's get started, eh?


Timer switch



That little beauty is the awesomest invention ever. I know it just looks like a light switch with a clock in it, but check it out:



It glows! Hahahahahaha!

Uh... too excited? Yeah? Thought so...

Anyway, the point of that particular switch is that, here in the wilds of BC, the sun goes down awfully early in the day in the winter. This meant that the War Department was getting home from work in the dark, and trying to unlock the door in the already darkened doorway. We needed a way to make the outside lights come on before she got home - preferably a way that didn't involve leaving the damn things on all day, sucking up power.

Unfortunately, the outside lights are on a three-way switch (there's another switch for them inside the garage), and we really didn't want to start tearing out drywall and rewiring them for a timer or light sensor.

Fortunately, we found these on the inter-tubage, and what with the War Department's prowess as an electrician, we now have outside lights that come on automatically when the sun goes down - and yes, the switch calculates sundown for us, without the use of an exterior light sensor. It even compensated for Daylight Savings Time. Gotta be right up there in terms of the best 60 bucks we've spent on the place.

New Arrival
I had to transfer some money from one of my investment accounts to another, and some of it "accidentally" made its way into an entirely different account. One that promptly signed over the contents to Sears:



What's in the box, you ask?

One of these beauties:



No, you can't see the front yet. Not until it gets installed on Wednesday.

Finishing Up Old Chores AND This Week In Mayonnaise
Way back when, we fixed this monstrosity on the front wall of the living room. As I explained at the time, it was a piece of old extension cord spliced into an electrical wire that ran through sprinkler piping out through the wall, and underground to the lamp beside the driveway - the fake wrought-iron Canadian Tire special visible on the right side of this picture.

Anyway, we were out puttering around in the nice weather on Saturday (seriously - what the ever-lovin' Jebus is up with the weather this spring? It's almost April and we haven't even mowed our lawn yet! Sheesh!) and Amy asked if I thought I could just push the lamp over, and get it out of the way. Turns out it wasn't nearly strong enough to support the weight of the slab of concrete in which it was based, and the lamp snapped neatly in half. Which, I suppose, made it easier to carry into the garage where it will sit until our next trip to the recycling depot. Once that was out of the way, though, we took a closer look at the base:



Yeah - looks like the electrical was equally as crappy on both ends of that installation. It's not even outdoor wire - just regular old Romex. They just fed it right up through the form and poured the concrete over it. And then they set the lamp down into the concrete, essentially ensuring that the wire would ALWAYS be passing directly through whatever water had accumulated in the base.

Oh, and those little round marks around the outside of the footing? Coins. From the eighties. Oh, and I just KNOW you're wondering how (because "why?" would be unanswerable) the coins were attached to the concrete. Go ahead, ask me.



Mayonnaise, of course.

Finished!
Anyway, in the five days or so that it's taken me to get around to actually finishing this post... we finished the office! Whoo!











Of course, I can't actually use it as my office yet. See, we kinda need it as a spare bedroom and to store all the crap we've been storing in Amy's office.

Three guesses what the next project is, and the first two don't count....

An Anniversary
Before I go, I'm not sure how this affects what I'm sure are a number of various and varying pools and betting circles out there, but this was exactly a year ago today:



So there. Nyaaah!