9/19/20
Aloha Everybody –
A pretty quiet week here. Lots of photons – my solar system has been really cooking, with several days of sunny afternoons. This also meant the house got a bit toasty, but between our pool and our great new bedroom a.c, it really wasn’t a problem. Even with the warmer days it is still cooling down overnight to below 70d. And with less rain the humidity has been lower, too.
Big house project this week was painting another fan. This one is in our kitchen and hangs above our cooktop. It provides light for cooking and also if necessary pulls smoke up toward our skylight directly above. Anyway, after my success with the one in our entryway, I decided to refurbish this one as well. The design (big white round blades like a flower) is identical to the one in the entry but the attached light is different. This one has four smallish canisters that are adjustable and provide quite a bit of light on the surface below. After some dangling on the 12-ft. ladder, I got it down ok and dismantled. This one had lots of grease, of course, and so I had to spend time cleaning that off, which turned out to be very difficult because much of it had become an insoluble military-grade coating. Also, when I dismantled the canister lights I discovered frayed wiring and dangerously brittle wire with burnt insulation! Yikes! I think the former residents of the house had put very high wattage bulbs in the fixtures that were way over their safety rating – we found this in many of the other fixtures in the house as well and immediately changed them when we moved in. I managed to find replacement sockets and new wire at Lowe’s and redid all the canisters before continuing the painting, and we have LED bulbs in them that don’t get nearly as hot as incandescent bulbs, so I’m pretty sure this is MUCH safter now. It also looks great, if I do say so myself. I still need to touch up some areas I missed on the first coat, and once that dries I’ll remount it, probably Tuesday.
The virus is proving to be a tenacious little sucker. In general our numbers have dropped and the health care facilities are still handling things ok, but on our island one day there are only 6 or 7 new cases and on others there are 20. The latest cluster was among workers at Target in Hilo. Nevertheless, our Governor has announced that the state will start a pre-testing program for travelers beginning next month. If a traveler can show a negative test result 3 days before arriving they won’t have to do the two-week quarantine. This might get the economy moving again, but it is hardly fool-proof. Unwitting “fools” can still be exposed on planes or in airports while traveling here and be asymptomatic as they move freely around the islands. Of course, the mask requirement (and it IS a law here, recently upheld in a state supreme court case) will still be in place, so that will help. As a fairly long-time resident I say emphatically to anti-maskers and virus-deniers, “you are NOT welcome here -- please have the decency not to come. Infect yourself and others somewhere else.” This viral yo-yo is getting very old..... And my prediction is that when a vaccine is announced there will be a huge surge in cases as people prematurely will relax their precautions. The reality (sorry, DT) is that it will take until sometime next year to vaccinate 180 million people in the US – the approximate number it will take to reach “herd immunity.” Sigh.
Ok, off to our usual Saturday morning routine, though again modified by having breakfast on the lanai of our friends’ house instead of the beach, and not doing our PF workout because we did that yesterday instead when there were fewer huffers and puffers. Take care, everyone, and try to stay sane and healthy.
No comments:
Post a Comment