Paradise ponders: fuses, filling stations, and irrigation systems edition...

Paradise ponders: fuses, filling stations, and irrigation systems edition...  This morning my brother Scott (who lives about 20 miles from me) emailed me to say that his Nest thermostat had died.  This time of year that means no air conditioning.  Scott told me it was no problem at all, but then he'd say that unless his death from heat stroke was imminent.  So I gathered up my electrical meter and a spare Nest and headed up there.  It took about ten minutes to determine that the problem was caused by a blown fuse in the furnace (which is where the 24VAC power for the Nest comes from).  I'm not sure why there's a fuse in the first place, given that the furnace is on its own dedicated circuit breaker.  So I just bypassed the fuse, and everything started working again.  The funniest part of this for me is that the Nest would have been complaining about having no power for the last week or so, every time Scott walked by it.  He never noticed it!  :)

While I was up there, I got a closeup look at the gigantic driftwood horse he's building (photos below). It's really quite beautiful, and it's almost done – all that's left to do is the tail and the hooves.  Scott figures that the thing weighs 600 pounds or so, which means that there are some challenges moving it around.  Another challenge is that it's too tall to fit through the garage door!

I also got to see the Russian Olive tree that Scott trimmed up last fall.  His intention was to make it evocative of clouds.  I don't think I'd have ever figured that out, but it's nonetheless very attractive, and also very different than the natural shape of a Russian Olive.  He's got a sign up advertising that he did it, but unfortunately the tree is located on a relatively lightly traveled back road – most potential customers for something like this will never see it...

The past couple of days have seen substantial progress around our place.  Randy and his sidekick finished putting the rock veneer on our filling station, and it's just as pretty as can be (at right).  Not bad for a gas station, hey what?  I now have to install the lock and the closing mechanism, but the necessary bolts and holes for that are already in the door so this should be almost trivial.  I'm hoping to do that tomorrow morning.  That means the only thing left on the filling station is to get the leaks fixed.  That was supposed to have happened this past week, but did not – I'll hold out hope for next week...

We also hit a big milestone on our irrigation system: a big part of it is now up and running!  There are 13 zones (with about 120 sprinklers) in the part of our yard that's south of our paved driveway, and all but one of them are now completely functional (the one exception is a bad solenoid controlled valve, which will be fixed on Tuesday).  The past few days saw a lot of electrical work, to run the wires for all those valves under our bridge and over to the new cedar shed.  The fellow running the wires had cut them all too short (by about 15'), so on Friday I spliced 20' extensions onto all of them, using soldered hook connections, padded with electrical tape, then covered with heat shrink.  That was a bit tedious, but not really very hard (not counting the effort to recover the tools and parts that my dogs kept stealing).  Yesterday morning I routed the wires along the inside of the shed, and connected them to the irrigation controller.  Then I used the web interface to set up a schedule (see screenshot at left) and away we went!  I've run the entire set of 12 functional zones twice now, and we'll keep doing daily that for a week or so to help settle the ground.  I've been wondering whether I'd live long enough to see this irrigation system actually working, so it really feels good to see some of it actually going...