electrician – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I thought about putting an exclamation point at the end of my age up there– 47! — but that implies a level of excitement about this birthday that I don’t really feel. Honestly, I could do without it, and I’m feeling a little bit of stress about this one that I really don’t remember being there the last few times July 5 rolled around. Maybe it’s got something to do with yesterday being the hottest day in the history of the human race, or maybe it’s just that I’m undeniably in my late forties now, with 50 staring me in the fucking face, and I feel like my sudden realization earlier today that my hobbies haven’t changed noticeably since I was nine years old is kinda hitting harder than it deserves to as well.

But fuck it. I’m 47. That’s what 47 looks like on me. There’s a video going around on TikTok right now of a woman who claims to be 28 who looks at least a decade older than me so things could definitely be worse. And it’s not like I don’t know plenty of people who didn’t make it to 47 to complain about it, too.

(EDIT: This post is auto-linking to my birthday post from last year, which I also started with a selfie. I am wearing the exact same shirt today that I was wearing a year ago. Apparently the idea of wearing red the day after the 4th entertained me both years.)

Anyway, I’m an electrician now. This has been hanging in my former dining room/ current library since we moved in in March of 2011:

It had a bunch of dangly glass things with it that we removed almost immediately, and I’ve mostly been hitting my head on it since we moved the dining table into the other room. I finally took it down and replaced it today, with this significantly simpler model:

That’s an LED ceiling light, and you can adjust the temperature of the light. Right now my wife thinks it’s perfect and I think it’s too fucking white, so we can look forward to fighting over that for forever, but I don’t need to buy those stupid fire-shaped lightbulbs ever again. I also swapped out the existing dimmer switch with a newer one that was supposed to be specifically for LEDs. This is, as it turns out, a pretty simple job all around, mostly requiring convincing yourself that you’re not going to electrocute yourself while you’re doing it. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that my house has aluminum wiring, having been built during the five-year or so period where copper was hugely expensive for some reason. There are special little boxes you’re supposed to use to connect copper and aluminum wires, but again, they aren’t complicated either; they just make the job a little scarier.

I also discovered while swapping out the dimmer that it was installed wrong, and was in fact installed without the little boxes, which is basically exactly what you’re constantly told not to do when you’re working with that type of wiring– you don’t want to pigtail them together like you would with two copper wires, because something something science science and they can spark and cause a fire. I hope to hell that that dimmer switch was installed a lot later than the rest of the house (it would make sense that it was a late addition, since, after all, it used copper wire) and I’m really hoping that I’m not about to find out that every power switch in the house is installed incorrectly. Since this went off more or less without a hitch we’re going to swap out a few other fixtures that we’ve decided we don’t like, and while we’re doing it I’ll look at the switches and make sure they’re installed right.

The punch line to all of this is that now that it’s in I’m not sure I like the new light. It’s higher in the room than the chandelier was, as you might expect, and so it throws shadows on the books and statues and various and sundry other things in the room in a way that was very different from the chandelier; you can get some hints of what I mean from that picture above, although I wasn’t smart enough for a “before” image. We’ll see; I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I also haven’t seen it at night yet, so we’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of hours.

Anyway. On to 48, I suppose. Sigh.

I can’t take credit for this one.

Stage Two involved installing the new shower fan (I really should decide/find out what these things are called; I call it something different every time I refer to it) in the new ceiling above where the bulkhead used to be. While the actual work involved didn’t frighten me all that much, the location of the work did: in my unfinished attic, balancing precariously on rafters and trusses and other things that mean “balance beams.” I am a fat man, kids. I know intellectually that I’m not so substantial that I am likely to come crashing down through the roof so long as I’m not dumb enough to put my foot down in the wrong place, but I have never had terribly good balance and the simple fact is I’m probably going to put my foot down in the wrong place at some point.

(Fun fact: I’m not afraid of heights. Or, at least, I’m not at all afraid to be high off the ground– just so long as my feet are planted firmly. I don’t like being balanced precariously precisely because of my not-great balance issues; I’d be perfectly happy up on the observation deck of the Sears Tower, but if you ask me to climb an eight-foot ladder, especially if you want me at the actual top of the damn thing, I’m gonna side-eye the hell out of you before deciding if my sense of masculinity insists that I actually do it. It depends on the ladder, too; I’ll climb twenty feet on a ladder that feels solid before I climb six feet on a dodgy one. And while I’ve never actually done it, I’m pretty sure I’d be perfectly happy to skydive given the chance.)

Anyway, the solution was to call in my father-in-law, who worked as a general contractor and is much more comfortable with this sort of thing. And it’s turned out to be an annoying job, too– the construction of the thing mandated that it had to be installed from below, which I wasn’t counting on and which required some fancy drywall cutting to make sure we could actually slide it up through the preexisting ceiling without tearing it down. Then there was a random extraneous board in the way which had to be cut out (not a big deal) and a damn thermostat wire in pretty much exactly the wrong goddamn place, which he worked around. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time on a stepstool in the tub giving my shoulder muscles a workout by holding the damn thing up above my head in proper positioning while he (I swear, on purpose) took as long as he possibly could to mark holes, predrill, and then finally screw the fan into place.

Which, as it turned out, was as far as the work got, because guess what else we have in our attic? Aluminum wiring. Which has a nasty habit of causing fires when spliced or pigtailed with copper wire. Which is sort of a problem, especially since this is going to be in an attic full of blown-in insulation, which is allllllll sorts of fire-hazardy. (Minor pride moment: I noticed this first; all those hours of watching Mike Holmes shows finally paid off!) Anyway, this isn’t an insurmountable issue, it just means that we have to get special connectors to join the wires together and we didn’t happen to have any on hand. So the remainder of the hookup is happening today while I’m at work; theoretically by the time I get home tonight we’ll have a functioning shower fan again.

Just in time for me to wreck the shower surround… tomorrow? Monday? We’ll see.

Whee!