Summer Solstice Moon
We are in the realm of the sun. Heat and light. Green and growing things. Long days and short nights. Glad to be here and glad it’s a short time. Heat oppresses me much more than cold, which goes a long way to explaining why I continue to live here.
Captured energy from the sun comes in many forms: sugars, carbohydrates, meat, gasoline, heating oil, wind, hydrological. Among humans a favorite form of storing and dispersing the sun’s energy is the generation and distribution of electricity.
Even in the heat and light though access to electricity can vanish. Be cut off. Just ask the folks in Minneapolis after last weekend’s storm. We rely on regular electricity for our air conditioner, refrigerator, freezer, computers, kindles, televisions and various other small appliances and lights. It’s an important part of our life. I couldn’t write and distribute this blog without it.
And it works well nearly all of the time. But when it doesn’t. Uh-oh. That’s why we wentto the expense sometime ago of installing a natural gas powered generator connected to the gas line feeding our home. We would have no water. (We have our own well.) No A.C. No lights.
The electricity was not flowing along the circuits necessary for our irrigation clock and out to the machine shed aka honey house and the kid’s playhouse a ways beyond it. Had to be fixed, especially the irrigation clock. The white haired guy who ran electricity to the playhouse and installed some lights for us came out. We wandered around, guy time you know. Hmmm. Head scratching.
In both cases thank god it was g.i.f. related, that is, ground fault interrupters had tripped. I didn’t know there was one in the garage; it’s hidden under shelving. One fix.
The sheds. I know about the g.i.f.s. There are two, one in the garage and one in the shed. I had reset both of them and still couldn’t get power to either shed.
“It’s confusing,” he said. Each building has to have its own cutoff switch, a switch that turns off power to the whole building. The switch in the honey house has only that function, but you can turn the light off in there by either the pull chain or the switch. However, once the switch is thrown all power is off the honey house. So, if you use the pull chain, the light won’t light. And, if you turn the bulb off with the pull chain, even restoring electricity to the shed with the switch won’t turn it on.
And. The playhouse gets its power through the same line as the honeyhouse. So, shut the switch off in the honeyhouse and no power to the playhouse. Plus. The playhouse, as a separate building, has to have a main power switch. Which it does, sitting right next to the light switch and looking identical to it. Can you see the confusion here?
So. I went out to both sheds and put blue masking tape over each of the main power switches. This will reduce the likelihood of anyone using them as light switches. Which starts the whole cascade over again.
And all this just to distribute what the sun offers free to us all. Strange, isn’t it?
