Let’s set aside the fact that we get to chose between two old white men, people who’ve had more than enough time to fuck up the country; when we could have had a staggeringly well prepared, intelligent, friendly and insightful woman who actually knew what the fuck she was talking about AND had f’king plans to actually implement them (Elizabeth Warren) instead of just repeatedly saying what they wanted, with no costings, nor any actual plan to make them happen. Then we get to pit old white man against racist bigoted idiot child trump.
Let’s set aside that because she’s a woman she got alternately ignored or slighted by the press. Let’s just put that aside. And as a result let’s put aside my worries that many people will lack the enthusiasm for Biden, or lack the desire for avowed socialist Sanders, and we’ll end up with the defacto installation of a trump dictatorship. Let’s put aside the enormous harm that will do to the country, to the world, and the number of people who will die unnecessarily as a result.
Let’s put that all out of the way, because frankly I can’t bear thinking about it right now.
Let’s instead concentrate on the day at a more personal level.
But in doing that, let us also put away the frustration of multiple runs to town because I forgot stuff, then the stuff I bought didn’t work.
Let’s also put aside my failures with caulk, which are many and manifold, and which have left us with this monstrosity:
Yesterday I stripped the light that will be our dining table light down to its constituent parts, and prepped them for painting:
So today I set to and put a couple of coats of paint on them:
They may well need more – getting the paint onto all sides is tricky, especially when it’s both windy and threatening to rain. But this paint is extremely odorous and spraying in the garage was simply not going to happen.
We also put up the final light in the office (yay!) having resprayed the dismal object that arrived. It looks okay, largely because it’s far away. Some things are good quality, and some things are a sufficient distance not to be able to tell the quality.
We also got our super-industrial kitchen lights up:
Which would be a cause for much celebration if they worked. But they don’t. There’s a curious 0.2v phantom voltage across the live and neutral even when off, and 0.1v between neutral / live and pretend-ground (mutter, grumble). I don’t know where it’s come from, it seems too low to be munged insulation, and is way too low to be a short. At any rate, as soon as you turn the lights on the breaker trips.
So that’s a fun task for the weekend. Trying to fault-find wiring. Yay. I’m hoping that – as someone on the internet suggested – tiny phantom loads can be due to a poorly tightened screw, apparently, on the breakers. I’m not deeply hopeful and am suspecting I get to take a lot of light switch covers off, and then try and work out what’s going on with the switches and check all that gubbins over.
Like I said, it’s not been a good day.
