Paradise ponders... What a busy day here yesterday! It started around 4:30 am, when the milkman drove in and set off the dogs. Sleepily we realized that we'd forgotten to set out the empty jugs. Oops! No matter, they left our two and a half gallons anyway :)
I filled the bird feeders after our morning caffeiniation. We're using about 10 pounds of black oil sunflower seed per week right now, along with around 6 pounds of “high value” food (nuts, dried fruit, shelled sunflowers) and 4 pounds of Nijer thistle. All the sunflower seed and thistle feeders have to be refilled daily. Our feeders attract huge numbers of American goldfinches (often more than 50 at a time), Lesser's goldfinches, house finches, and red-winged blackbirds. We also get chickadees and nuthatches in smaller numbers, and a couple of (so far unidentified) woodpeckers that love to hang on our suet feeder (which is loaded with a mixture of lard and peanut butter). The occasional magpie comes in and tries to figure out how to get to the seeds, but all our feeders are magpie-proof. We also get Asian pigeons that like to hunt on the ground for misplaced seeds. The sound from all these birds is something I greatly enjoy: if you open our front door it can be quite overwhelming. Our UPS deliveryman commented on the sound yesterday, amazed that it was always like this...
I started working on my office in the shed in the morning, finishing up the wiring of the outlet strips. Then I decided to get ready for the ceiling fan that was scheduled for delivery in the afternoon. On Thursday I had purchased an “old work” (retrofit) ceiling fan box that could be installed through a 4" diameter hole. I marked the center of the room, offset a few inches to avoid a truss (detected by knocking on the ceiling), and then cut my hole with the oscillating saw (love that thing!). Next step was initially a stumper: how do I get the wire from the hole in the ceiling to the wall where I had power available?
The ceiling hole is 13' from the exposed wall with power, and the intervening space was filled with trusses and blown-in insulation. There's no way that I could squeeze into that space – and even if I could, I'd wreck the 18" thick blanket of insulation. My first thought was that I'd poke the 14 gauge Romex up through the hole while Debbie watched from outside and gave me some guidance. That plan fell apart when I discovered that Debbie was not comfortable climbing the ladder (all these years and I never knew she had a fear of ladders!). My second plan worked much better. I have a “fish” – a fiberglass rod in screw-together sections – that's designed for fishing wires through walls. That rod is quite flexible, about like a wire coat-hanger. I screwed together enough sections to make a 15' “pole”, then wiggled it so that the far end was roughly over the hole in the ceiling (I had to guess about that, as the hole was covered by all that insulation and I couldn't actually see where it was). Then I got on a ladder inside my office, stuck my arm up through that hole, and felt around until I felt the fish. Success! Then all I had to do was to tie the Romex onto the end of the fish, go outside and pull the fish out. That worked great.
The fan ceiling box turned out to be trivially easy to install. I'd expected that job to take a few hours, but instead it was under a half hour, beginning to end. When the fan came in the afternoon, I had it installed onto the new box in under an hour – and it all worked on the first try (even the snazzy remote control that came with the fan). Now my office has a fan to circulate the air warmed by the wood stove, and some lights. Yay!
This morning my student Abby S. should be here for a lesson, and then my brother Scott is going to be here to help out a bit. I'm hoping to be able to finish up that last bit of outlet strip wiring, and I also need to install the fan's remote control into a hole in the wall. Once that's complete, it's cleanup time – and then I'll be moving my stuff over to the office...
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