Getting Good Help

I increased the size of the images I upload – which might improve the quality of what you see. Or it just might mean you see more of the flaws. πŸ™‚ In any case – it was another cold, albeit mostly clear, morning. The snow comes back in a few hours and it will be visiting us for much of the week. I’m supposed to go upriver tomorrow – the one day it should be possible to do that.

The population of this household will be increasing when I return, at least temporarily. The giant yellow lab from next door is moving in for a few weeks and the big setter from down the road will be spending part of each day here as well. The rest of them are fairly used to this but it will be a whole new experience for Blink.

I did get some wood split last week and then a friend came down with a chain saw and a much larger splitter. My job was (supposedly) the easy part – the lifting, carrying, stacking. I wound up with more than a cord of Tamarack which makes me very happy and my house very warm. It also makes me more determined to find a source for more this year.

I’ve talked about Cowboy Carpentry and Cowboy Plumbing a few times, and may have touched on the creative wiring I’ve encountered in this house. Still it surprises me every freaking time. I was heating something in the microwave the other day and it suddenly died – along with the fridge. Everything else in the kitchen was fine. So I guessed I had to go reset a breaker but couldn’t figure out why. I mean I’ve used the microwave before and this hadn’t happened.

Then I remembered that, because the back door had been open for hours (on a really cold day while I transported firewood) I was giving the woodstove an assist with a space-heater in the sun porch. I discovered that yes, on the other side of the house, the heater and the TV were both now off. Each plugged in to separate outlets. The light next to my chair and the hepa-filter (plugged in to outlets on different walls in the same room) were just fine.

Everything electric between the fridge/microwave on one side of my home and the TV/heater on the far side were chugging along without a care in the world. I would not want to have to follow a map drawn by the brain which wired this house.

Why? you might wonder, am I sharing a bad photo of that smoke cloud? It’s actually steam coming from the Pt. Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. I tend to think of it as something which is way off in the distance because it takes about 2.5 hours to get there on my way to Saint John. In fact, it’s only about 15 miles away. It takes time to reach it because of the ferry to Deer Island, the drive to a second ferry, that crossing, and then the drive along the coast to the Station.

Yes, there are people worried about the dangers of this type of energy but I’m not one of them. Honestly, I’m not sure I would have volunteered to live this close to one but it’s not something I think about every day. I also highly doubt we’re on some foreign bad guy’s target list. I’m just hoping they had competent electricians working on their job site. πŸ™‚

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