Before I start the news … We will be traveling from Monday, Sept 24 – Thursday, Oct 25. The best way to contact us is to send me an Email. Or you can call at 410-417-8854 and leave a voice mail. We will receive the voice mail by Email. Every place we are staying advertises internet access. I will check Email daily if possible. I will also post frequently while we’re traveling.
There’s no hurricane effects around here, but it was a wet week. The forecast was “cloudy with a chance of rain” almost every day. Thursday, the forecast changed to “cloudy with no rain”. I took a 2-hour ride. The rain started half an hour after I got back. That’s a lot better than a half hour before I got back. The rain broke Saturday. I was able to ride, but had to start a little later than planned because the overnight showers hadn’t ended yet. Today is nice, but we are looking at more rain Monday and Tuesday. Here’s hoping the forecast for sunshine for Wed – Fri holds.
I put LED bulbs in the our ceiling fans. The fans in the two master bedrooms have remote controls. The remote controls don’t turn the lights off. They let just a little current trickle through, and that’s enough for the LEDs to light up. That means we can’t run the fans at night. I don’t like having rotating machinery over my head when I sleep, so I didn’t care that much. But Rick and Suzy wanted a fan. We got out an old, ugly, noisy box fan for them. It was time to fix the fans. I called the manufacturer. Their advice was to put incandescent bulbs in because their fans “aren’t compatible with LEDs”. That’s a bunch of bunk. The problem is their remote doesn’t turn the lights off. I looked around Amazon. It turns out that lots of people buy inexpensive fans with two chains — one for lights, one for the fan — and later decide they want a remote. And there are companies who want to make these people happy, for a price. I found a $20 remote that controls the fan and the lights, and turns the lights off. I ordered, received, and installed two if them. End of problem. Almost. The way these remotes work, if one turns the wall switch off, then on again, the lights always turn on. You can turn the lights off with the remote, of course. But if the wall switch is off, and somebody is sleeping, there’s no way to turn the fan on without waking that somebody up. The world isn’t perfect yet.
We had a neighborhood party Friday. We have a dinner party Sunday. It’s called “Farewell to Summer”, but Danita and I are calling it “Farewell and good travels”. We leave for France the next day. I think it’s nice of the neighborhood to send us off like that. ;-)
That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.