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like a balled-up fist
Monday, November 12 2018
Today being Veterans Day, a lot of my employer's customers were on vacation (presumably allowing some of them to spend all their mental energy justifying Donald Trump's "idea" to prevent the counting of overseas ballots — many cast by active-duty troops — in the ongoing Florida state-wide post-election madness). This downtown allowed the tech team to schedule a much-needed migration of data and applications to new servers. This didn't have much of an impact on me, but it did affect that stupid project involving a receipt printer, so I got roped into a few conversations and even a meeting. Not that I'm complaining; there is nothing this workplace needs more than more meetings.
In terms of my workplace work, I racked up another important win on an ExtJS task, which, given how hard it has been to work with, was important for my morale. I learned a few more quirks, such as how to dynamically alter the selectedIndex of a ComboBox (which, under ExtJS, is a much more complicated operation than doing the same thing to a SELECT under vanilla Javascript). I've also grown familiar with the stupid means available for calling methods in different classes. Now I routinely write stuff like AppName.app.getController("AppClass").lastApplicationStatusSetting.index = currentIndex;. Not that ExtJS will ever do much for my resume; it's a little like being conversant in Middle Farsi.
Meanwhile, another minor drama was playing out at the brick mansion, where it turned out that the motion sensor light I'd installed above the landing (between the doors to the second and third floor apartments) was on all the time. That's better than being off all the time, but it isn't ideal. And, as if that weren't enough, a motion sensor light above the outside basement door had just stopped working. In an attempt to figure out what might be wrong, Gretchen had photographs taken and emailed and I asked a few questions. But information alone was incapable of fixing what wasn't working, so it was looking like I would have to go over there.
One of my co-workers mentioned going to a nearby agricultural supplies store for dog treats, and it put that place in my mind as a potential vendors of electrical equipment (as the Augusta Cooperative Farm Bureau was back when I was a kid). So I went over there this afternoon. Unfortunately, the only supplies they sold relevant to today's problem was 120 volt LED light bulbs, but while there I also bought a small garden trowel and a little forked hand cultivator. At the time, I was the only customer in the store. There was also a fat barn cat working in one of the outbuildings.
At the end of my workday, I escaped at my customary early time (though this time my escape was notice, in this case by the people still trying to do the server migration) and drove directly to Home Depot, where I bought the cheapest motion-activated outdoor light kit (~$15) and yet another Lutron occupancy sensor (in case the one I'd already bought was a dud). Then I drove over to the brick mansion. But because I hadn't brought the landlording keys, I then had to call one of the tenants to have him let me in. But when I went to check my workplace Gmail, where the tenant's phone number should've been, my phone failed to read the latest messages. And when I went to call Gretchen, I got a message from my cellphone provider telling me that my calling plan was on hold due to a failed payment (I have a month-to-month plan with Cricket Cellular, which uses the AT&T network). Fortunately, it wasn't difficult to re-up my plan right there on the brick mansion's front porch. Then I could call the tenant, and then I could come in and try to fix the motion-activated light on the landing.
But the replacement sensor didn't work any better than the one it replaced. Was the household voltage (145 volts) too high? Was the ground bad? (This kind of sensor seems to use the ground for the purpose of neutral, which is a wiring no-no.)
So then I had the tenant let me into the basement so I could fix the motion-sensor light above its back door. My original plan was just to replace the little sensor that juts out of the connection box (like a balled-up fist beside the light itself), but as I disassembled that part, it became clear that the two sensor attachment systems were probably incompatible. It would make more sense in this case to just replace the whole motion sensor apparatus, which included a pair of bulb sockets. Since I was working near the basement, I had the luxury of being able to work with the circuit breaker turned off, using the phone in my shirt pocket as the handy no-hands flashlight I'd discovered a week ago. At one point when I came out of the darkness, my "flashlight" beaming like a single tiny motorcycle headlight, I momentarily started the new tenant in 1L. She'd only been living there since the beginning of November.
I was feeling pretty good about the success of my landlording by the time I got home (at around 7:30pm). But when I walked into the house, I found it was full of smoke. Fortunately, Gretchen was there and had stopped whatever had been going on. But it was terrifying. A woodstove is a dangerous thing and must be monitored, particularly when it is running hot.
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