The Adventuress

Yesterday I had the special opportunity to take a "3-hour tour" on the Schooner Adventuress. What a blast!

Checking in

Gee, where has that bazuzi guy been?

Well, since the twins came, I've had my hands full. If you're thinking that twins might be a more efficient way to grow your family, let me tell you right now: you're wrong. Have those babies one at a time.

The first couple weeks were the hardest. We were absolutely exhausted from the birth. With newborn twins, mom is pretty much nursing continously, and that doesn't leave much opportunity for her to sleep.

To make it worse, we were dealing with a C-section birth and milk-supply issues. Because the babies weren't gaining, we started supplementing with formula, which adds a bunch more work (washing bottles, preparing formulat, etc.)

The babies are now 3 months old, and I am sad to say that we're still supplementing with formula. Still, I'm proud that we didn't give up breastfeeding entirely, and that we can continue this plan until they start solid foods in a few more months. Also, I'm glad that we were able to pick a formula that is a healthy choice for our babies, and we haven't given a penny to the formula companies (we make it ourselves).

We had found a nice routine. During the day Mom nurses both babies continously, taking a break at some point to fill them up with a bottle & give her a break. At night Mom sleeps with one baby, while Dad gets the other. Every 90 minutes my baby wakes up and we swap.

However, at 12 weeks I went back to work (new job!), and now it has become much harder again. I'm not around during the day to keep filling water bottles & deliver plates of food to mom, change & walk babies, etc. The babies often wake up around 4am, which ends my sleep for the night.

They're probably going through a growth spurt, which I hope will settle down soon, so we can get a little more rest.

In other news, my oldest son is now in pre-school. I never wanted to put him in a school, but the combination of work+twins has made it attractive. There he gets a chance to play with other kids, do art, learn a bit of academic stuff, and play outside. It gives Mom a break, too.

To make things interesting, I bought a tandem attachment for my bicycle, and we ride to school together. After dropping him off, I ride to work, where I get an opportunity to actually shower!

He insists that he doesn't want to go to school, but every time we pick him up, he says he loved every minute.

I haven't been fermenting much, but I did start a new batch of mead / T'ej, made wild cottage cheese and raw cream cheese. (Yes, I started a google group on Wild Fermentation.)

Today the Azure Standard truck is supposed to be coming to the house, which means lots of families dropping by to pick up their food, and hopefully to help. (Yes, please help!)

A frustrating night

Getting the family to bed this evening was pretty frustrating.

My 4 year old has been going to sleep at 1-2am. It's hard to get him to bed earlier, especially because our hands are full with the twins, and because we're too tired to engage him in a way that doesn't involve a TV or computer screen.

As a result, he wakes up at 11am-noon. By the time he has had breakfast and gotten dressed, there's not a lot of daylight left. I have to work hard to find 15 minutes to get him outside to run around. Sometimes a friend will pick him up & take him out to play (thank you!).

With sunset at 6pm, it means he goes a long time from active play until bedtime. That means that he is ready for more active play at 10pm, just when I want him to start to settle. Of course, we're too tired at 10pm to engage in active play with him. We often have sleeping babies in our arms, and would like to get some sleep as well, but can't because he is still up.

Shortly after he falls asleep, a baby wakes up & needs attention. He sleeps through it, while Mom & Dad get sleep in 1-2 hour increments through the night.

Today he didn't get to go outside even for a minute. I tried explaining the relationship between when he goes to sleep & when he wakes up, and he decided to go to bed at 9pm. However, he forgot about that once he got overtired/hyperactive in the evening.

Tonight was particularly bad for me. I have a cough from the dry air, and my throat gets very tired. He kept ignoring me, so I had to repeat myself to get the message across ("if you want to play outside in the light tomorrow, you need to go to bed now").

He also go violent, hitting & kicking me, and grabbing my legs. When he grabs my legs while I'm holding a baby, I feel very scared because I worry that I might fall & hurt the baby. Mom & I both find it very hard to treat him with respect when we're exhausted & he gets violent.

I would so like to just give him the information, and let him live with his own decisions. But it affects the rest of us. An under-rested child has a short fuse, just like an adult.

Finally I told my wife that "I needed a timeout", and went to sleep with the baby that I was holding. The 2 hours of sleep until that baby awoke was enough to help me function again.

I gave the baby to Mom to nurse, and slept for another hour. Then the other baby awoke, so I took to first one back & put him in the sling.

He fell asleep a little while ago, so I really should go to sleep, too.

Buying a car - the rest of the story

I had an idea of making a series of posts about my car buying experience. However, with the recent arrival of the twins, I don't see myself having a chance to work on it. So let me see if I can summarize the process.

After determining that a minivan was the right configuration for us, we looked at Consumer Reports. They ranked the Honda Oddessey and Toyota Sienna almost identically, and well above all other minivans. So it seemed like the right choice to get one of those.

A big question was how to configure the car. There are some pretty cool options; which to buy? Power sliding doors would be great when hands are full of babies & groceries. DVD player to pacify the kids on trips. Power 3rd-row windows make those windows much more useful.

In a moment of clarity, I realized that the right answer was to buy none of these things. Safety, reliability, comfort, gas milage, and room enough for the family are important. Spending money in the car on anything else is rarely worth it, for us.

The Honda was redesigned last year. In the process, they raised the bar, making a bunch of features standard, which were still optional on the Toyota. Sure, these features would be nice, but I wasn't interested in buying them. This put Honda at a disadvantage, price-wise.

It turns out that the lowest trimline on either model is almost impossible to find on dealer lots. There's much more money to be made on the upscale trimlines (especially this close to Microsoft), so the dealers just don't stock them.

My plan was to make the dealers compete against each other for my business, based on guides from the Motley Fool. However, if there were only 3 of my model in the whole Pacific Northwest, then there wouldn't be a lot of competition. I adjusted the Foolish approach to be a little less specific about exactly what I was buying (since there were no options that I required).

I used Edmunds' and Consumer Reports' pricing services to get an idea about what the price on the van might be. Note that both "MSRP" and "Invoice" are marketing numbers, and have little connection to the cost of the car, or even to what the dealer paid for the car. However, Invoice is a good starting point for figuring out what you might pay.

I then emailed a dozen dealerships. Most were close by, but I picked a few in the next county, and a couple that were 100 miles away. The mails I sent looked something like:

I plan to buy a [Sienna/Odyssey] in the next 2 weeks. I am interested in
the [CE/LX] trimline, with no additional options or accessories. Color is
not important. Over the next 3 days, I am taking bids from various
dealers. Please reply to this mail with your bid.

Some dealers replied with hard prices ("We will sell that to you for $22,734.") but others didn't, including "come on down", "we have a blue one in stock, is that OK?", "please call so we can talk about configuring it to meet your expectations", etc.

I entered a dealership early twice during the process, and regretted it both times. The second time, I made it very clear ahead of time that I was coming to the dealership to get a quote. The salesprick talked me in to a test drive, and then got out the "4 square worksheet" and tried to get me to start negotiating. I got pretty frustrated that he wouldn't just give me a quote. I walked out, annoyed that I had wasted 2 hours on that place.

One Honda dealership give a very good offer, only $800 over the best Toyota offer. I decided that $800 was probably worth the large feature gap between the two cars, and had felt good about my interactions with them so far. I showed up & we started to do paperwork. Half-way though, they discovered a "math error", raising the price by $1000.

I don't know what really happened. Was it a legitimate mistake, which the sales manager caught? Did the sales manager say "no way we can sell for the price you quoted; try claiming you made a math error"? Or was it their plan all along, to try to wrestle more money out of me?

I don't know, and it doesn't matter. At $1800 over the Toyota, I was no longer willing to buy the Honda. I also was unwilling to try to negotiate price in the dealership. So I packed up my stuff, and walked out.

Remember that when you're in the dealership, they have a huge advantage. Put yourself in a position of advantage when you negotiate. For me, that was at my desk, with 15 browser windows with car information.

I emailed the dealership with the best quote on the Toyota, clarifying the price. (I've heard of dealers stuffing in extra fees, so I asked them to disclose all numbers up front). I decided I was OK with the result, and told them they had won my business.

There was an annoying process where it took 4 days for the dealer to get the car from across the state. I kept making plans to take off from work to go get the car, and then had to cancel them.

Once I got to the dealership, it took 3 hours until I could drive away. A big chunk of that was waiting in line for the "finance manager", who took my check in 10 minutes. Luckily, I planned ahead and brought a book. I picked a comfortable looking vehicle in the showroom and sat in the passenger seat to read.

I didn't have a trade-in (keeping the old car for trips without the babies), and didn't finance (I had saved up money, but would have used my bank instead of dealer financing). This made the paperwork simpler, and made it harder for them to hide costs. It also meant that the dealership was making less money, so the quoted price was firmer.

Dealerships, like casinos, don't have clocks around. They don't want you to know how long you're spending there.

• Negotiate remotely
• Stay in control
• Be ready to walk out of a dealership at any time
• Be clear about your requirements ("I leave a 2pm, with or without a car")
• Never buy "today"; tomorrow's deal will be fine

The Sienna is damn comfortable. I really enjoy the luxury of riding in the passenger seat. It also handles quite well, especially the very tight turning radius.

One day I want to install a PC in the van, which provides music, movies, and navigation. Synchronize the media with the home archive with wireless networking, etc. Some cool possibilities...

Now that the old car is somewhat redundant, I also intend to party on it a little bit. Not sure what, yet.

Guess what I got?

Last Thursday my wife gave birth to two twin boys. They're beautiful & amazing. They also like to sleep during the day.

The good news is that the in-laws come tomorrow.

A nue doo

Been really busy getting ready for the twins.

Realizing that I will get even less done once they come, I have selected a new, easier-to-maintain haircut.

Getting a good picture of it seemed hard, so I decided not to. Instead, here are these shots:



(See also my previous do).

Buying a car - class

With the news of twins, I have been working on buying a car. I think that I did a reasonably good job of handling the process, so I'm going to describe what I did here. I hope it can be useful to others.

The first step was to decide if we needed a car at all. Thanks to folks who commented here, helpimg me figure that one out.

Then we looked at how little car we might be able to get away with. For example, could we buy a larger sedan? It was easy to do some measurements and see that we couldn't fit all 3 kids, in car seats / boosters, across the back row. However, what if we put the big kid in the front seat, and the twins in the back? This is fine as long as there is only one adult. I figured that most trips only have a portion of the family, so using 2 cars for whole-family trips would be tolerable. However, the law in WA state will change next summer to say that kids can't sit in the front seat. And it's safer in the back, too.

It didn't take long to eliminate station wagons, either, as they wouldn't fit the 3 kids across.

An SUV that could fit us all (think 3rd row) would probably have terrible fuel efficiency, and conserving fuel is important to me. I also want to spend less, and put less weight on the road.

So, that means a minivan.

What have I done?

First they see this:



Then they do this:



It's all my fault.

Two different outlooks

I have this memory from my youth. I was probably 10-11 at the time. My brother would have been 4 or so.

My parents both worked to make sure I could go to a private school. The school didn't have bus service, like US public schools do, and it was on the other side of the city, in the expensive part of town (of course).

This particular day, my dad was driving the car, with all 4 of us in it. (I think my Mom's car was broken that day?). This is a city criss-crossed by interstate highways. We were approaching the point where you get to choose between highway or local streets. My parents started to argue about which way to go. The argument was about much more, however. It was about the way they thought about how to live life.

For my dad, the obvious choice was the highway. It was fast and efficient. Sure, the highway was ugly & ruined the natural lay of the land, but as long as it's there, you may as well use it. As he likes to say, you can take from the system what you want. He knew that his mission was to get to work, and start doing his job, providing for his family.

For my mom, the right choice was the local streets. They're more interesting. You get to see the different neighborhoods, and how people live in different part of the cities. Every day you can take a slightly different route, and you never know what you'll find. (My mom knew every thrift store in the city). It made the trip a valuable part of the day. It also was a way of saying "yes" to local, varied life instead of "yes" to the anonymous highway.

My dad rose to be president of the European subsidiary of a small software company. He figured out how to play the game of corporate life, and played it well. He is financially secure. He thinks of himself as a radical, though, because he doesn't take the game seriously, studies yoga and meditation, and only takes from the system what he wants, instead of doing what the system tells him.

My mom seemed to always take some of the most difficult nursing jobs available. Hospice, home care, etc. They never seemed to pay well. Every now and then a better paying job might come along, but even if she took it, she never adjusted her lifestyle to match. She never ate out. Her house was always small & cramped, and most of the work on it she did herself. This was all deliberate. Any time she didn't like the way things were done at a given job, she always knew she could just walk away. She could choose to do the most meaninful work she could find, without having to compromise for money.

I am a bit of both.

Yoga of Eating

I just finished reading The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein.

My first exposure to his writing was in his article, The Economics of Fermentation (a variation in Wise Traditions), mentioned in a previous post.

Something about his writing always seems to ring true with me. Perhaps he's saying things that I know but can't articulate yet. Or perhaps he has an attractive writing style. Or something else, I don't know.

There are some ideas in this book that have really got me thinking. I won't go in to detail now, just listing a few.

• Changing one thing means changing every thing.
• If you listen closely to your body, it will tell you what nutrition it needs. If you hear it saying "eat cake", then eat cake!
• The way that our modern lives feel so busy, so hectic is not an unfortunate consequence of our lifestyle, but a central feature. In software we say "it's not a bug, it's a feature".

More to come.

Ginger soda - mixed results

This week I decided it was time to try the ginger soda I had started in December. Some mixed results that I don't fully understand, so I'm going to go in to a lot of detail here.

A friend had made a good batch of ginger soda & given me a bottle. After drinking most of it, I saved the sediment at the bottom in my fridge, for some months.

When I was ready, I mixed 1/2 of the sediment with water, grated ginger, and white sugar. (I wonder if the mineral content of rapdura would work better. Yeast needs nutrients.)

I keep my house pretty cool in the winter, at least by US standards -- 62deg F (17deg C). I've noticed that at this temperature many of my cultured foods go pretty slowly. To help the culture along, I put the jar in the oven with just the light on. Recently I measured with a thermometer, and it's probably about 80deg F in there.

Every day I added more ginger & sugar to feed the culture. As it grew, I split in to two jars to keep one in reserve.

Finally the big day came. I boiled 1.5gal filtered water w/ a stick of fresh ginger, grated. Then added sugar (don't remember how much, but it was sickly-sweet). Let it cool, which took a while.

First vessel was a 1gal apple cider jar. Poured in 2qts of the mix, through a plastic funnel. Added filtered water to 1/2in from the top. Put a latex balloon over the mouth to measure CO2 production and restrict oxygen exposure. There are special devices for this, but I didn't have one.

Then I juiced a few fresh, organic lemons and added to the mix (but not in the first vessel). A friend is allergic to citrus, and he loves ginger soda, so this one was for him.

Second vessel was another 1gal apple cider jar. Again, 2qts of mix, add water. Another balloon.

Third vessel was a 1.5L Grolsch bottle, with swing-top (aka bail-top) lid. This is the only one that isn't clear.

Forth vessel was a 1/2gal jar that Kevin bought me at IKEA. A thoughtful gift from a friend. It has a wide mouth with a swing top.

3 of the vessels have narrow mouths, so they're hard to clean. It's possible that the insides weren't spotless. I am sure I had rinsed them out very well, so I don't think there was much soap or anything, but maybe some dried-on stubborn matter was still there. They looked clean to the eye. I now own 2 bottle brushes that should work well in these containers, and an in-sink bottle washer.

The vessels went in to the guest room where they wouldn't be disturbed. (Why do I own an entire room that is only used for 2-4 weeks per year? Topic for another blog.) Every day or two I checked on them, and vented the balloons if they were full. Here's how it went.

Vessel #1 (no lemon) never produced a single bubble. After a full month, the balloon had been sucked in slightly. A bit of mould grew on the surface. Dumped down the drain.

Vessel #2 started bubbling very soon. It made the balloon stand erect 3-4 times. Then it went quiet. At one point I tried moving it to a warmer part of the house, but it never produced more gas.

Vessel #3 (Grolsch) showed no signs of fermentation for at least 2 weeks. Then it started to bubble, and was active for the last ~3 weeks.

Vessel #4 (jar) followed the same pattern as #3.

This week I opened #3 and tasted it. It was excellent, so I decided it was time to check the others.

#4 was also good. Moved it to smaller bottles & gave them to friends.

#2 was still way too sweet. Why would the culture go inactive, when there was still so much sugar available? I added a little bit of #3 to provide a healthy, active culture. Put the jar in the oven with the light on. It became somewhat active again, but not as much as I would have hoped. It's still sweeter than I'd like, but perhaps people who drink soda every day will enjoy it. (My taste for sugar is much more sensitive these days).

So, why these variable results? Why did #2 go dormant? Why did #1 never get going? Any ideas?

We flip for rock 'n roll

According to the ultrasound, one of the babies is currently head-down, and one is head up. They say that the babies will turn towards sound, so we applied some Neil Young.

Carless in Seattle

I'm having myself a little thought experiement. Could we live without a car?

Of course, really the question is "could my wife + 3 kids live without a car, in Seattle". It requires a great deal of tact to explain to someone why you are taking away their car, and why they'll like it. And I don't have a lot of tact...

We live in the suburbs now, but suppose we lived in the city? My understanding of city life is that things are easier to walk to than to drive to. And that buses in Seattle are very good.

Remember that we're talking about TWO newborns and a very active 4 year old.

Anyone reading this that has lived carless in the US with a family? Any advice?

The growing family

A bit of news for my readers: our family is growing. New baby coming, and all that. Should be arriving in a month or so.

As part of this, I've been trying to figure out some logistics.

For example, we have one car, and like it that way. Can we fit 4 of in a Saturn SL2? I like taking the bus to work. I'm slightly more likely to walk or bicycle places, and I certainly could use the exercise. When my son & I ride the bus to a museum or something, the bus ride is part of the adventure. I never have to pay for parking in the city. I'm reducing my contribution to traffic, fossil fuel consumption, noise, and air polution. I don't have the stress of negotiating rush-hour. I can read on the bus.

Living in suburbs makes the no-car thing a bit harder. There are fewer busses that pass my home. Everything is a little further away, as you have to walk past homes with yards & cross wide streets to get to it.

We just got some news this past week. We're having twins. I'm still feeling a little stunned. We'll be a family of 5! Suddenly I have to repeat all the logisitcal planning...

5 of us certainly won't fit in the car we have, if you remember that 2 of the passengers will be in rear-facing infant carseats for 18 months. In fact, there aren't a lot of cars that will fit all of us. We'll be trying out some station wagons, but it may be too tight. Could get a crown vic and own the road. :-) Otherwise, it's minivan time.

An attempt at spelt pita

My son may have a wheat sensitivity, so we've been trying to keep wheat out of his diet. Good pita bread is an food for me - something I grew up eating. So I decided to try my hand at a spelt pita.

I asked my arabic grandmother to help me make some. She was used to refined wheat flour, and we were using a strange oven, so I'm not surprised it came out a bit odd. I did get a picture.

Old paint

While doing work around the house, I found myself in the middle of another task.

One thing we've managed to collect in this house is old paint.

When you paint a room, you think "I'll save one can of this extra paint, for touch-ups". I don't know how realistic that is - I can't think of a time when we've touched up a room, at least beyond the first week after painting it.

Anyway, the collection was quite... extensive.

Some of the paint was clearly in bad shape, and that I'll get rid of.

However, there are many cans of paint in various colors that might be useful, just not to me. Perhaps you want to paint a wooden box to be a play prop for a kid. Or you are in a theater group, and want to paint props there.

If you have an interest in taking this paint off my hands, let me know.

What I mean by 'debt'

I mentioned the idea of 'debt' in my previous post.

I picked up this idea from the Agile software community, where they call it "Technical Debt". Let me attempt a definition:

- When an activity creates an unmet need, that need is a 'debt'. As long as that need is unmet ("the debt remains unpaid"), you continue to incur increased cost ("interest").

Here's a simple example. I cook breakfast for my family. After we eat, there are some dirty dishes. I could wash them now, or leave them until later. If I leave them, the food will dry on, and it will be harder to wash them later. If I try to cook something else in the kitchen, I have to work around all the dirty dishes in my way, which makes the new task more expensive, too.

Just as with financial debt, it sometimes makes sense to pay it off now, and sometimes to wait and pay later (with interest). For example, if I need to get to work early, then it may be worth it to leave the dishes.

With my finances, I don't live with debt. I don't have a car loan, or an ongoing credit card balance, or unpaid student loans. Partly this is because I am fortunate enough to make a good income, but many of my coworkers spend all their money & more, and end up in permanent debt.

BTW, the one debt I do carry is a mortgage. I think this is a wise debt to carry. We were already paying a rent before buying a house, so the majority of the monthly obligation is not new. The value for that money is high (large house + land vs. apartment). A very small portion of each payment goes to the principle, so it's not lost. The tax breaks from owning a home are very good. Most importantly, the value of the home has increased substantially, causing a major growth in equity.

Working at home

I took 2 weeks off for vacation at the end of the year, and decided to use one of them to work on the house. I asked my wife to make a list of all the things she'd like me to do - painting, hauling, electrical, whatever. We'd prioritize, and then I'd spend a full 40 hour week doing it. The second week I planned to relax.

Obviously, part of the goal is to pay off some of the accumulated debt in the house. (Not a financial debt, but a need that I created at some point.) The other part of the goal is to see how it feels. How much of this work can I really expect to do myself? What can I learn to do, and do successfully? Will I be able to stay motivated enough to do this work? Will I always need to pay an expert?

I've been doing that work all this week. It has gone well. The biggest surprise is how each task generates more tasks.

For example, there was "seal the grout around the tile in the downstairs bath". While doing it, I noticed some tiles that were really loose. They came off with 2 fingers. Underneath, I found that the drywall had rotted away some time ago, and someone had filled in the gap with some kind of cement, which also came out with my fingers. The drywall is quite mobile here, so to fix it, I'd want to pull out more & look in to bracing it better. Time to call a professional.

So, this means that the downstairs bath is not available for bathing, so I took a look at the upstairs shower. The water flow was always a bit low, even when we moved in 8 years ago. But both it and the adjacent sink had gotten *really* slow for hot water recently. We have steel intake pipes, which are about 45 years old (they won't last much longer).

I disassembled the shower head and cleaned it out. While it was off, I turned on the shower, and the water flow was high. And brown. Rust was pouring out in the water. Once it turned clear, I jiggled the faucet, and more brown came out. Kept doing this until it stayed clear.

Reassembled the shower head, and now the shower has acceptable flow.

However, with all that water coming out so fast, now the drain doesn't do it's think fast enough, and the shower fills with water.

As I was removing the drain cover, I dropped one of the screws down it. Now I need to go buy the exact right screw to fix it.

Cleaned out the gunk from the drain that I could see, but it still doesn't drain fast enough. Next step is to grab the plunger.

Figured I should clear the downstairs bath drain as well, so I opened it up. Could see gunk, but couldn't really reach it. Regular pliers couldn't, either. I knew I had needle-nose pliers, but couldn't find them.

Pulled all my tools out of my tool area and sorted them. Spent a few hours figuring out how to arrange tools. I don't want duplicates of everything, and I'm not very good at keeping things organized as I use them. In the end, the overflowing shelves of tools became neat & clean, with some shelves empty. It was amazing how much trash I pulled out of there.

The biggest collection in my tools working on electrical stuff. I have face places, 120V receptacles, Ethernet jacks, an insulated staple gun, fish tape, etc. I think electrical (both high & low voltage) is the kind of home work I enjoy the most.

Finally at the end of the day, I had pulled the gunk out with the needle-nose pliers.

However, the drains still don't work. That's for today.

Oh, and the TODO list is bigger today than when I started on Monday.

Power on

In a continuation of yesterday's power adventures, today I did a some more outlets.

I made the 2-prong outlet properly grounded, as I mentioned.

I replaced 2 switches. The new ones are higher quality, so I'm feeling good about that, too.

I went to do the last outlet, and ran in to trouble. When I went to screw in the new outlet, I couldn't get one of the screws to take. The box was plastic, and the screw hole had stripped. Also, while working on it, I had cracked the box on the side, which didn't seem like a good thing.

I wanted to replace it, but it was securely fastened to a stud (good!). Actually, it was rivetted to a metal bracket which was nailed to a stud. I was able to get behind a wall in another part of the house to get an idea of what I was dealing with.

I basically demolished the box with random tools, pulling out the peices as I went. Then I used a prybar to pull the nails out, which was a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS.

Once that was done, and my ass had recovered, I installed the new box, new outlet, etc. All good. I also stopped to praise my choice to buy some extra gang boxes yesterday.

Other interesting notes from the experience:

- 2 of the walls in the kithen had wallpaper, which was painted over. Bad. Some of it tore while I worked, and now there's a white blemish next to a light switch. Need to touch that up.

- While working on the plug that I didn't get along with, my 4-year-old flipped some breakers. Scary.

- I actually did manage to give myself a little jolt. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't exactly painful.

Time to pause being an electrician. Tomorrow I go back to moonlighting as a software developer.

power corrupted

(This is a bit of a departure, topic-wise, for my regular readers. It'll be interested to see if it resonates with anyone.)

As part of my work in the kitchen today, I replaced two power outlets. We had already decided to freshen them up, to make them all white & matching. These two were quite an experience, though.

First, they appear to each be on a dedicated circuit.

One has relatively modern 2 conductor + ground, 12ga wire. What's odd is that the breaker is 30 amps! If I could convince myself that it really was a dedicated circuit, I'd replace the outlet with a 20 amp one, which might be nice to have.

The other one has the same wiring as the rest of the house: It's all 12 ga, with cloth insulation. The ground wires never go in to the gang box in the whole house. That seems weird to me, but maybe that was how they did things back in 1959. (yeah, my house is ancient!) In this one case, however, the ground wire was screwed in to the back of the gang box, which was metal, so the outlet could be grounded. Everywhere else the gang box is plastic, and the outlet is 2-prong.

On top of this, the gang boxes were just screwed in to the drywall with wood screws! Not even with a drywall anchor. So as I starter my work, the screws pulled out of the wall. Uggh.

Off to the hardware store to buy some old work gang boxes. Had to cut out the wall a bit to fit the boxes just right. In the end it all went back together fine, and looks good.

Tomorrow I replace the other two outlets in the kitchen. One is 2-prong, even though the gang box is grounded (I tested). So it'll be going to 3-prong.

Weird wiring in this house. And I'm still trying to make sense of the 30A breaker on the 12ga wire...