Replacement lighting just in time for Halloween

fluorescent spooky light

getting ready to connect the wires from power to the new light fixture

and the new incandescent light sheds exponentially more light than the old one

We had fluorescent lights in part of the basement and they just kept having flickering, on/off issues- it was watching a scary movie but in our own basement.  You'd flip the switch and it may or may not light up-if it did go on, it was often with only one out of two bulbs and the light would flicker, waver and dim. "Creepy" definitely applied and we weren't going for the haunted house look.  (Although I do think some spiders benefited from the arrangement because we just couldn't see them with the bad lighting.)  So we took on a new lighting project.

We turned off the power to the area in question - this is where the those work lights come in handy-the kind you can plug in with a long oranges extension cord into the outlet a room or two away.  We used one similar to this one featured by Home Depot: http://www.homedepot.com/p/HUSKY-75-Watt-Metal-Shield-Incandescent-Trouble-Light-HD-408PDQ/204222074#.UkOfaz948g8  to light the way for the project.  We took down the old fluorescent lights (and recycled the bulbs through our local household hazardous waste collection events), put up metal housing units for the new lights, connected the power wiring to the wiring of the new fixtures, put on safety nuts, put in a fresh incandescent bulb, turned the power back on, flipped the switch and viola, let there be light!

It's great to actually be able to see in that part of the basement although there's a  certain poetic sadness (but not much)  to the loss of traditional creepy basement lighting (or rather lack thereof).

Sunday Randomness #24 Peaches

Busy canning  peaches...

These particular peaches are the variety known as Rosa.  They had red-orange skins, orange-pink flesh, the skins just slipped right off after a 30 second boiling water bath.  They are free-stone and quite sweet.  They were also large (softball sized) peaches and I had to cut most halves into thirds just to get them in the bottles.  The only drawback would be that they tended to bruise easily but their taste makes up for the delicateness of the peach.  We obtained these the first part of September at the Murray Farmer's Market.

Author #111: Books against Bullying by Erin Frankel

Erin Frankel's series of books by Free Spirit Publishing cover the ever present problem of bullying.  The three books show the same scenario from different perspectives: Dare is told by the bystander, Weird is told by the subject of the bullying and Tough is told by the person doing the bullying.  At the end of each book are steps each one can take to change behavior to getting along instead of victimizing or standing by the side.  Some of the lessons learned include:  In Dare Jayla refuses to take part in the bullying and encourages other kids to help instead of watching.  In Tough Sam learns that taking her anger out on others doesn't help her own situation.  In Weird Luisa learns that she is not to blame if someone bullies her and she doesn't have to change to please them; she can have confidence in herself and what she likes.  For more about the series and steps to prevent and change bullying, visit: http://theweirdseries.com/

2013 Summer Movies: #16 Something The Lord Made

Mos Def and Alan Rickman star in this true life story of  Dr. Thomas and Dr. Blalock who started cardiac surgery in 1944 on a baby suffering from blue baby syndrome.  Through their research, they introduced cardiac surgery to the world (over a million heart surgeries are now performed each year in the US alone) and they also saved countless lives through their research and work on traumatic shock.  Although Vivian Thomas performed almost all the lab work on the shunt process in hundreds of operations on dogs, he was only able to coach Dr. Blalock during the actual human surgeries since he was a lab technician and was not awarded an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins until 1976.

The film was made in 2004 and is not rated but would probably get a PG rating for surgical work on both dogs and humans and some language. 

 This was a wonderful film that not only tells Blalock and Thomas's story; it touches briefly on the story of Vivian Thomas's brother, Harold Thomas, and his fight for equal pay for school teachers.  His attorney?  Thurgood Marshall.  They won.  For more information there's another blog post at: http://gdhslawblogwill.wordpress.com/tag/thurgood-marshall/