Tag: lighting

Still going

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

We are still doing shit around here.

Got up at six. By 9:00 I was downstairs wrecking these shelves. They were in the way. I forgot to take a Before picture but I imagine you can imagine.

Then the electrician showed up. The electrician installed all new LED lighting in the basement and tore out a bunch of ballasts that were starting to fail and, in one case, melt. It is astonishing how much friendlier the basement looks now:

(Our basement goblin isn’t completely moved out, so some of that stuff is hers.)

I should find an older picture of the basement with the old lights. My God.

We took my wife’s old desk apart and threw it out:

I built (and by “built,” I mean “put together according to the instructions”) my wife her new desk:

Cable management is coming, I promise. It’s making me twitch too. That desk is adjustable, a sitting/standing desk, which is absolutely ideal for my wife because she’s only 5’ tall. See that little panel on the right there, that you use to adjust it?

Those are the icons for “adjust to standing height” and “adjust to seating height.”

The current state of the dumpster. They’re coming to collect it tomorrow, I’m not exactly sure when:

Oh, we also threw away another old shitty end table and my old desk from when I was a kid, which we were using in the garage. I’m fully expecting the guy to complain that the desk is an inch too high for the bin and to have to cut it in half at the last minute.

Not pictured: I threw away all of my CDs— several hundred of them– which have been sitting on a shelf in the basement for fifteen years. I strongly suspect a lot of them won’t even work any longer and there isn’t a single device in the house that even plays CDs any longer other than some similarly-ancient electronics in the basement that are getting taken to e-waste tomorrow or Friday. I only discovered one CD that I didn’t have an MP3 copy of— a recording by the jazz musician ex-husband of a friend who is no longer alive— and I decided that I didn’t need to go to the trouble to find a way to rip it.

Other tasks today: I beat the bedroom 90% into submission; most things are where they are going to live now, and my leather chair and ottoman have been moved into the library, which is now a little more crowded than I like, but all three of us can sit in there at the same time now. I also reinstalled the rack for the wall shelving that we had to remove when we tore the wall down. And, somehow, more vacuuming. Apparently at some point we ran an extremely busy pet grooming business for like a year, never cleaned up any of the fur, and never noticed until this week. Also I went to the comic shop. It’s Wednesday, after all.

In other news, I am about 120 pages from the end of the 1,232 page book I’m reading, and I’m going to either finish it tonight or die. Not sure which.

Tomorrow: one last frenzy of throwing things away until they take away the dumpster, put together the new cabinet for the garage, a little bit of touch-up painting in the bedroom, install the last bits of baseboard in the bedroom, clean clean clean, organize the garage as much as we can stand, a little more work in the basement, and go visit a showroom for the next bathroom project.

Yeah. There’s another fucking bathroom project. I’ll tell you later.

Let’s see

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I didn’t take any pictures at work today, but the classroom is coming along nicely even if it’s chewing holes in my bank account along the way. I really like the new room, though, and the first year in a new room is always more expensive, so hopefully what I’ve bought will last a while. I did discover, to my vague embarrassment and deep chagrin, that I managed to order rope lights twice, once very early in the summer and– and this was my critical mistake– brought to my classroom in June, and once in late July and brought to my classroom yesterday. I didn’t even notice the first set of lights yesterday since they were in the closet in my original classroom; I had a great moment when I found six boxes in my closet as I was moving stuff from one room to the other and for a few minutes couldn’t remember what the hell was in them. Then I remembered that at one point I’d been thinking I needed a powered USB hub, and I couldn’t figure out why I needed that, since the rope lights I just brought in plug in with a regular plug, and … shit.

Then I had to order a damn powered USB hub.

I have so many packages coming this weekend, y’all.

(You can still help me out with school supplies if you want, by the way. I’ll love you forever if you do!)

I am going to end up starting a fire in this room once everything is plugged in, y’all. I did find two more plugs in the room I hadn’t initially noticed, up near the ceiling next to a truly ancient tube TV that definitely doesn’t need to be plugged in and I’m going to see if I can get them to remove altogether. That brings the total to ten, two of which are simultaneously nearly inaccessible and somehow still perfect for a couple of the things I was going to stick in that corner anyway. Those ten plugs will have to power approximately fourteen thousand different things. I’m, uh, gonna have to do some extensive cable management.

I may not be able to make it over on Monday, but I’ll definitely be in my room every other day next week, since I also have a ton of curricular work to do and I want the room completely ready to go by the time I’m officially on the clock.

Anyway, in lieu of a classroom picture, please enjoy this cat.

Let there be light

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Much was accomplished today. Like, no bullshit. We got a lot done today.

The before pictures, keeping in mind that we’d already put a new light in the library. These lights are so goddamn old, guys:

The one on the table was the light in the entryway, and I want you to pay particular attention to that one, because it has fucking snowflakes on it for some reason, a thing I only ever noticed when I had to change bulbs and managed to annoy me anew every single time I had to do that job.

After, and yes, that’s a different light in the library, as we took the one we put in the library earlier this week and moved it to the entryway. The others are in the kitchen, bedroom hallway, and hall bathroom, respectively. The hall bathroom is the Bathroom of Terrible Decisions, a renovation project that has been ongoing for something like eight years and may actually be finished for real this weekend.

The after pictures:

The lights in the kitchen and the library match, the hallway lighting is hugely improved, and there are no longer fucking snowflakes on the light in my entryway. I am particularly pleased with the lights in the bathroom, which look stellar. The rest of the house feels astonishingly bright now, and there may be another project coming to add some dimmer switches, as the only place in the house with one is in the library.

I have had my arms above my head all day, and my shoulders are killing me.

Worth it.

What have we done?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

What has four thumbs and just dropped $450 on new lighting fixtures?

My wife and I! And we’re gonna have a fun weekend.

I’m sure there’s no way anything can go wrong. And this time I will make sure to get before pictures. 🙂

47

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

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.