Paradise ponders, rapidly-disappearing turkey edition...

Paradise ponders, rapidly-disappearing turkey edition...  Debbie and Michelle whipped up a beautiful traditional Thanksgiving meal yesterday (roast turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, apple pie, and pecan pie, along with some very nice wine), making the kitchen smell oh-so-enticingly all day long.  Jimmy, Scott, and I were tramping through the kitchen all day long as we worked on the deck's electrical wiring, and those wonderful aromas made it a bit hard to concentrate on the job! :)  Eventually the turkey was finished, and we all loaded our plates to the breaking point (mine is at right).  We finished the night with some sleeping conversation in front of a warm fire, then we all collapsed into bed for the night.

We woke yesterday to a beautiful winter day (at left), with snow on the ground and icicles everywhere.  By the end of the day nearly all the snow and ice were gone.  Today and tomorrow are forecast to have highs in the upper 40s, so the rest will probably melt off.  Then on Monday and Tuesday our forecast calls for up to eight inches of fresh snow, and the beginnings of a cold snap.

The electrical work we did on Wednesday (mounting the boxes) is in the first photo below.  Most of what we did yesterday is in the second photo.  That circuit breaker box on the right is getting mounted “right” – on an oak board that's affixed to the house's sheathing (instead of the siding as it was).  Toward the bottom you can see a duplex outlet mounted that same way, and toward the top you can see where I'll be mounting a pair of switches to control the deck lighting.  The smaller inner hole is where the metal electrical box fits, and the larger hole exposing bare wood is where the oak board will be mounted.  I'll caulk the siding where it meets the oak board, and that will give me a waterproof mounting that's affixed to solid wood instead of the relatively flimsy siding.  I've got things like this to fix all around the house; the original construction was done by mounting stuff right to the siding which I think is pretty darned shoddy.  It would have been easy to do it right in the first place, but it's much harder to fix after the fact...

Today (and tomorrow) I'm going to keep plugging away at this.  I'm hoping to have the outdoors work all done before it gets too darned cold to work.