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almost always worth paying whatever you can afford
Tuesday, October 15 2024
Early this afternoon I drove out the the brick mansion to do an electrical landlording chore. The tenant in one of the apartments was saying a light wasn't working when she turned on the switch. This particular tenant had checked all the boxes, which was probably how they (the person is non-binary but reads to me as female) ended up with the apartment in the brutal (for tenants) rental housing market. Not only is the person non-binary, but they have two rescued animals: a little dog with two paralyzed hind legs and a cute black chicken hen with a deformed leg who likes to sing in the cheerful way that happy chickens do.
In tracking down the source of the problem, I first diassembled the switch, but then couldn't detect any AC voltage difference between either of the lines and the ground in the box, though perhaps that ground was disconnected and there was no ground. So then I tested between wires in that box and a nearby outlet, and soon figured out that this was a light that was being switched on and off via neutral, not the hot wire. Lights in our house in Hurley are wired this way, and it makes them dangerous to service unless you turn off the circuit breaker, since the hot wire is always hot no matter whether the switch is on or off. What made this switch even more dangerous was that it wasn't even part of the circuitry controlled by the breaker box for the apartment; it was instead on a circuit controlled by a breaker box for the public parts of the building, such as the hallway. I didn't discover this until I'd switched off every circuit in the apartment and the light continued to shine. Fortunately, I was able to find the circuit breaker that controlled it, but by that point I was so untrusting of it all that I worked with it as if it were live. It turned out that the switch was the problem, meaning I didn't have to tear the overhead light apart. All I had to do was replace it with one I'd thought ahead enough to bring.
After that, I drove out to 9W to run some shopping errands. The first place I went was to ShopRite, a grocery store I haven't seen the inside of in years. It had been substantially remodeled since the last time I went there, and now it has a vast self-checkout area. I was mostly there to buy beer, though I also bought potato chips and diphenhydramine. By this point, a recreational dose of pseudoephedrine was kicking in and I had that wonderful feeling of being a humanoid space ship controlled by tiny aliens.
At the Home Depot next door, I bought a dual-pole 15 amp circuit breaker for the new cabin minisplit along with some plumbing bits and a sack of portland cement (as the bag in the cabin's basement had been destroyed by humidity. I also wanted to buy conventional masking tape, the beige kind we remember from our childhoods. But I couldn't find it anywhere. Perhaps it has gone the way of rubber cement.
Finally I drove out to Adam's Fairacre Farms, mosty to buy fresh organic vegetables, crimini mushrooms, and a bag of onions (as I'd used the last of our semi-rotten onions in the Hurley refrigerator to make the pizza). On the drive home, I drank a can of cold-pressed coffee I'd bought from the little Adams refrigerated display catering to impulse purchasers.
Back at home, Gretchen was involved in something of a bidding war for a very nice house on a nice street in Rochester. Its price had started out substantially below $300,000, but our winning bid was $350,000. That's more than any of us have ever paid on real estate. But the thing about the perfect house is that it's almost always worth paying whatever you can afford to get it.
This evening after Gretchen left for pilates, I took the dogs for a walk just east of the wetlands east of the Farm Road, then looped around just east of the abandoned go-cart track and home via the bottom of a shallow valley in the plateau west of the Farm Road. I'd never walked specifically in the bottom of that valley before and hoped to see interesting things. As I walked, I snapped dead branches from the bottoms of white pines so that this route would be easier for the future me to take. Along the way, I found a deer skull, one without antlers, and it was green from algæ on its surface. Deer skulls are pretty common, but this one was in unusually good shape, so I brought it home with me.
Meanwhile I've been adding more features to my ESP8266 Remote Control system. This morning, I made it so the two graphing pages that present weather and solar inverter data can accept and act on query strings to pre-specify values in the dropdowns. This will come in handy should I need to generate links to specific time units in the past for specific locations. This evening, I did some work making it so that the reports can have multiple different views specified in JSON. By views, I mean how the report data is displayed, such as tables, graphs, or even maps. I'd had a provision for doing this, but it only allowed for one view, and that view overrode the default table view. Now, though, I can specify several different graph views, which I can select from a dropdown before running the report. If these views do not have names (as they wouldn't for legacy views), then they're simply listed as "unnamed."
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