It’s been another busy couple of weeks. A week ago, Buffalo NY, where alot of my family lives, got a once-in-ten-years level snowstorm, with my parents in Orchard Park getting six feet of snow. Up in Amherst they only got a foot or so, but it complicated plans for people coming home for Thanksgiving, especially for my niece and nephew whose trains got cancelled.
In the end, everyone made it home safe and sound, and we had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving. We hosted seventeen people and Jeannie made a most excellent stuffed turkey dinner. Spent the rest of the weekend listening to music, mainly classic live albums, and playing games like Ticket to Ride and Quirkle with Lizzy and Michelle.
I also finished some home improvement projects. The big one was was to replace the light fixture in our kitchen ceiling, which blew out right around the end of the summer. It was an old florescent light in the form of a square wooden box with plexiglas diffuser. It first I I investigated the possibility of replacing just the socket and electric components. Once it became clear that wouldn’t work, the quest for a new lamp became a full-blown research project. We finally settled on one we liked, a broad, shallow frosted glass dome with traditional light sockets that could take modern LED bulbs. We ordered from a local showroom, but it took several weeks to arrive, and by that I was folding like a madman in preparation for our origami conventions.
Back home again a couple weeks later, I pulled off the old fixture. I had planned on having to paint the area that had covered because the new light is smaller. What I didn’t count on was that the old fixture was screwed directly to the ceiling, and there was just a hole where the cup for the wiring and structural support was supposed to be. So I had to cut a hole in the drywall, buy and install the mounting hardware to the framing of the house, put back the drywall pieces, fill in the gaps, and sand and paint it. This added considerable time to the job, especially since the ceiling needed two coats of paint. I ended up finally installing the new lamp Thanksgiving morning, with Jeannie urging me along so we could switch the power back on in the kitchen and she could put the turkey in the oven!
I didn’t quite match the ceiling paint, but it’s pretty close. Lizzy, who works for Sherwin Williams, was very helpful in recommending a mini roller and pan kit; I din’t know they made such a thing. She also gave me a deck of all their color chips, so hopefully I can do a better job matching next time.
Oh, and, the week before Thanksgiving was a big one for milestones at the Innovation Lab at Consumer Reports. Here are a couple of press releases about two projects of mine.
https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2022/11/16/introducing-permission-slip/
https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2022/11/15/osiraa-release-announcement/