Switches Down

OK, so you have a 3-way switch to control the ceiling light in your hallway. Coming from your family room, you flip the switch to turn it on. At your bedroom door, you flip another switch to turn the hall light off. Simple.

You don’t care whether you flip either of those switches up or down, you just flip it to the opposite setting you found it in.

Depending on who installed those switches, you could find that both switches down results in the hall light being ON or OFF. That guy probably didn’t care which way it would be, just like you don’t care.

 

I care.

 

I have installed a fair number of such 3-way switches over the years, and I always make sure that if both switches are down, the light is OFF. If one switch is up and the other down, then the light is ON. It’s just a thing for me. Is that OCD or just anal?

Autopsy?

The maple tree that so well shields our deck from sun grows a billion leaves every spring. In the fall, the aged and decrepit leaves lose all their greenness as well as their will to live. That's what is normal.

Now and then I see abnormalities, like this guy:

I can't get him out of my mind. Dropping dead at such a tender age. It's barely June.

What kind of trauma did the guy suffer? These guys have birds shitting on them all day long and do just fine, or maybe thrive. 

In the absence of other data, I'm going to say that Facebook is to blame. Other leaves on the same branch heckled, mocked, criticized, derided, and made fun of him until he just couldn't take it anymore.

Medical School

 I went to med school the other day. In Dr. Collard's office I studied the HAND poster - which came in really handy when Dr. Collard came in and diagnosed carpal tunnel syndrome.

So I am wearing a brace for 2 months and then most likely scheduling surgery on my left hand.

Not to worry, Dr. Collard says, "the surgery takes 10 to 20 minutes" and "nothing can go wrong."

He didn't really say that last part.

Look Carefully

 Examine this April 20 photo carefully and tell me what doesn't belong.

How Good is Your Water?

I posted this (below) to the NextDoor website yesterday. It has generated 44 comments so far, ranging from "Oh God, that's horrible!" to "Hey, doesn't look that bad to me - what were you expecting, crystal clear water?"

Pretty much my whole life people have told me how good the water is around here – the stuff that Missouri American Water is pumping into our homes. And if you ask MoAm how good the water is, they have a mountain of data to show how good it is.

But in 2017 I installed a filter on the water line coming in. The replaceable cartridge was snow-white, and quite brown in October 2018 when I replaced it with another snow-white cartridge. Then last week I replaced it again, but I took a photo of it before replacement, and it was again quite brown after serving my needs for about 2-1/2 years.

 This time I captured the sediment that was left in the bottom of the bowl when I took the filter cartridge out. After the water evaporated, I put the sediment in a teaspoon for another photo.

I gotta give MoAm a D on this one. Maybe an F, if I knew what was in that sediment. If I knew what brown stuff is embedded in the filter cartridge.

 

The Day That Would Never Come

Came.

In broad daylight I walked into a store in Chicago and paid money in exchange for marijuana.

Ooops. Make that cannabis. Apparently marijuana is out of style and cannabis is in.

What's in a name? I don't know. But I know that the weed is powerful.

And legal. Well, in Illinois it is.

In Missouri, it's just powerful.

It's unlikely that I will ever be able to juggle bowling balls after smoking it.

Power To The People!

Just about 45 years ago, some electrician buried the power lines that have supplied electricity to our house, which was then under construction. The underground conduit runs about 150 feet from a terminal box at the southeast corner of our lot, near the street, to the meter mounted on the west side of our house. Unlike overhead power lines, nothing goes wrong with the underground lines.

But then something did go wrong.

 

Three insulated cables are in the conduit. Call them A, B, and Ground. The voltage on A is 115 Volts as measure to the Ground. The voltage on B is 115 Volts. These A and B voltages are out of phase with one another, such that the voltage between A and B is 230 Volts. In the house, there are a bunch of 115 Volt circuits, some of which use A and some of which use B. And then there are a few 230 Volt circuits which connect to both A and B.

 

On April 8, we woke up to find that some of our lights and outlets were working and some were not. In the breaker box, I used my voltmeter to find that A had its full 115 Volts, but B had zero volts. The circuits fed by B were the dead ones.

 

Ameren Missouri supplies our power, and they have a pretty good system to report outages online. Within an hour, a guy called to say he was on the way but had to finish up some task nearby first. Another half-hour went by and a guy showed up with everything he would need to restore our power. He verified that the B cable was dead at the meter. He took the cover off the terminal box near the street to find that the B cable was very much alive there. Then he got a big coil of cable from his truck and connected one end to the terminal box and the other end to the meter box at the house. He ran the new cable across the driveway, through the grass.

 

Voila! We have power! And a big ugly cable running across the lawn.

 

Ameren will, at some point (couple of weeks from now?), send a crew out with an instrument capable of finding the break in Cable B, showing them where to dig. Dig they will. They will make quite a mess to uncover the bad spot in Cable B a couple or three feet down, make a repair, and then restore the lawn to some semblance of presentability. 

 

Presumably, the cable now stretching across our lawn will go back in their truck for a future use. 

 

Presumably, I will have some work to do to restore the lawn to the standard I have set, which is likely a bit higher than the one Ameren has set.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Postscript: Ameren crew showed up, having given me no prior notification, to repair the buried cable on April 13. I was driving home from Chicago at the time, so I was not able to see what kind of problem they discovered when they dug. When I got home, they had obviously dug a hole about 18 inches square and restored the sod as best they could. The temporary cable was gone. Power was on in the house. All is well.