Electricity 101

Our stake is getting ready for a Youth Musical, and, as usual, I have been asked to help with the lighting. The stage has some minimal lights but a terrible system for controlling them. Basicall, it's a set of light switches in back of the curtain. For any theater buffs in the crowd, you know that you can't run a show from behind the curtain, so I set out to design a way to run the lights from a set of dimmers with the controls located in the back of the cultural hall, where the operator can see what he is doing.

It was simple. Cut into the cables going to each circuit and put a plug on it so that we could plug them into the dimmers. Sounded easy. I asks Art, my brother-in-law to help. $150 later, and two days it was done. Here is how simple the process was.

Build a simple set of three way switches mounted in tandem boxes.

Locate the wires leading into the switches and tap into each one.

Cram it all back into the box that never was designed to hold even half of it. Nice to have a professional helping me. Piece of cake.

World of Color

As you may know, Suzanne loves paint. I've never figured out exactly what that means, but she really does love paint. We have been in this house for a bit over eleven years. In that time every room has been painted at least once and each room in a different color. We have also painted many many other objects. Needless to say, we have lots of paint in cans that are slowly dieing. It was time to get rid of some of them. As we dumped paint onto a plastic garbage bag to dry and took inventory, 'That's the front bathroom ceiling.', Oh look at this one. It's from that parade float.' 'Here's the front door.' we realized that Dutch Boy must love us.

Grandpa's little helper

Desh visited today while Allyson and Ken celebrated her birthday. He played in the water, said hi to the piano girl and stayed clear of the pool. Good boy.

Nice water.

Nice girl.

Nice pool.

Nice gnome.

Nice snail. See the snail right under his left hand? He handed it to me right after I took the picture.

Free zoo, who knew?

Went to the zoo on Monday with the marshall kids. Entrance to the park is free for seniors and the zoo is half price. Not a bad deal. We went to winged Wonders Bird show. The pictures are bad because we couldn't take too much time posing due to the crowds around us.

It was either get McKay in the picture or the eagle. As it turned out, neither one showed up very well.

Fed dollars to the crow. Smart crow.

And leaves to the giraffes. Stupid giraffes.

Conference Saturday

This weekend is our Church's General Conference. That means that, instead of going to church for three hours on Sunday, we get to spend much of our Saturday and Sunday watching five two hour televised sessions of conferences broadcast from Salt Lake City Utah . As it works out, since this always occurs on a wonderful spring day each year, Suzanne and I usually lay out a couple of projects to do while we watch. This weekend, we finished painting the office, planted flowers in our patio pots, rearranged the living room, bought new blinds for the bathroom and removed, painted and replaced the chandelier in the kitchen.

Listened to some pretty cool talks, too.

Thriller, spiller, filler.

See the before spot?

Two coats black, three coats of hammered.

She rearranged the shelves, too.