Nov 3, 2023 — Signate Chromatoptometer

Greetings!

The above photo captures a weird fungus growing on an old stump in our backyard. It really is that bright, and it’s surprisingly tough. I have no idea what it is called.

No, wait. I live in a connected world, and the Google Lens app is surprisingly good at identifying things from a photo. Hang on a sec…

It’s an orange peel fungus, probably Aleuria aurantia given when it appeared. I could reproduce the entire Wikipedia article about it but you can look it up yourself it you want to know more. All I really know is that it’s quite pretty.

Looking over the last week on the calendar, the big event was Halloween. As usual, it came with a truckload of fireworks being set off by idiots on the streets here in our part of BC. This is a tradition that no one really understands, and it is pretty well limited to our part of the world. The rest of Canada doesn’t do fireworks on Halloween.

Technically, it’s legal to buy some kinds of fireworks here, and some cities — including the one we live in — deal with this via a permit. The permit costs $5, allows firework purchases Oct 25–31, and they can only be set off on Oct 31 from 6pm to 10pm. Sadly, what actually happens has nothing to do with what the permits allow.

Fireworks start going off several days before Halloween, but not in significant numbers, just enough to cause the dogs to panic. On Halloween itself, they begin in the afternoon and build to a deafening, pounding, PTSD inducing level over the next several hours, probably peaking around midnight. Then they taper off, with the last gasp happening around 3 am. But this year Halloween fell on a Tuesday and the kids all had to go to school on Wednesday morning. That probably caused the chaos to go on a bit less then it would in a year when Halloween falls on a Friday or Saturday.

I hate the Halloween fireworks tradition. The city we live in — the District Of North Vancouver — is the last remaining holdout on the North Shore in which they are allowed. Both the City of North Vancouver and West Vancouver have made them illegal, and the DNV is supposed to make them illegal before next Halloween. Sadly, however, that illegality is (and will be) only a technicality. It seems the cities cannot regulate the sale of fireworks — that’s a provincial thing — so while they may be (or become) illegal to use, there is very little enforcement. I suspect they will stay a regular thing until their sale is restricted or a huge fire gets started and people realize just how dangerous they are.

In the meantime the dogs hate them with a passion, and so do I.

The other event from last week was what happened when I tried to do a good deed. A neighbour living across the street has a number of motion sensor lights on her home. One of them has been acting up for quite a while. It turns on and off every few seconds, all day and all night. Technically it should stay off during the day, of course, and at night it should stay on for some programmed time only after detecting something moving.

She lives alone, can’t get up to it on the side of her home, and paid an electrician a large amount of money to install these lights sometime before we moved in. I offered to have a look and see if there was anything obvious I could do.

I dragged my extension ladder over there, propped it up rather precariously against the corner of her house, and climbed up. I’ve seen these things fail in weird ways before, and often it just takes fiddling with the switches on them to get them to reset, but not this one. Nothing I could do changed its behaviour, so I disconnected it to stop the flashing.

Of course, I was working on it live. Yes, that was a mistake, but it was also something of a requirement. I needed power to test it, and she had no idea which breaker would switch it off. I can work on a single 110V light like this safely if I am careful, even while perched awkwardly on a ladder.

What I didn’t count on was that the “electrician” who installed it used a weird push type connector and left some exposed copper wire on both the hot and neutral lines. And of course as I was working on this I somehow managed to bump the exposed ground wire into the hot wire and pop the breaker. I didn’t know that at the time, though. Instead I got an email from her the next day saying a number of lights downstairs in her house didn’t work anymore. And of course she was busy and we couldn’t connect quickly to let me look into things. So I got to live with my stupidity for almost a full day.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Eventually we met again and it turned out she had just found and reset the breaker. At that point almost everything was working. The only problems were two other exterior lights. I could reach those from the ground and discovered similar motion and light sensors on them, but these had multiple switches. I fiddled with those and they started working again as expected, so that was good.

I have since found and ordered a replacement sensor for the light. Her only choice was to have an electrician in to replace it, and that would cost a fortune. For $36 I am getting a replacement sensor sent up here — apparently it is coming from the USA — and I will install it for her.

Thankfully, this time I know which breaker to flip in advance.

As expected, the latest issue of the neighbourhood email went out on Wednesday morning, and from what I can see it is doing well. The email list manager we use tracks opens and clicks and it seems to be following the usual pattern. I’m led to believe our open and click rates are surprisingly good compared to most commercial newsletters.

I have already started building next month’s email. Not that it takes a lot of time at this point, but I need a place to put the stories that come in, so I generally get the next issue started just a day or two after the previous one goes out.

The only other thing of note this past week is the ongoing battle with the maple tree in the front yard. It is dropping leaves at a furious pace, requiring regular raking and redistribution. This is made worse by the fact that we can’t even put one car in the garage, let alone both of them. As a result the leaves cover the cars to an astonishing depth and make getting them ready for use a time consuming event.

Some of the leaves were dropped due to the last cold spell, but a lot more came down during one night of heavy rain. They always make an awful mess and I feel compelled to deal with them so Anne can go to rehearsals without having to spend 20 minutes cleaning off her car first.

That’s it for this time. One of these days I really will do something more interesting. I promise!