[Monday 12\/21: 4.4 miles ; Wednesday 12\/23: 4.4 miles; Thursday 12\/24: 6.1 miles; Friday 12\/25: 3.0 miles]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the winter holiday factory shutdown, I am off work between 12\/24 and 1\/04\/2021. We had a nice quiet day on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas. Today I hope to get started on a couple of projects around the house. I also hope to make a trip to Des Moines sometime next week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Word came on Facebook yesterday that the man who gave me my first job had passed away, Don Norem. He was elderly and had been living in Florida for a number of years after being a “snowbird” since retirement. When I worked for him he owned an old-fashioned meat market on East 30th Street in Des Moines. I know that he also was a tile setter and carpet layer, and probably did other things over his working career. My connection to him was through church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This year has been strange for everybody. But here in the last few weeks it took an even stranger turn with the passing of my Uncle Ron; a classmate from highschool; another passing of a school acquaintance from long ago; and the piled on losses of my friend Jeff Winger (and my wife’s brother-in-law) with his mother and brother going in quick secession after loss of his father earlier this year. I don’t know any of these as being directly attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a factor in any of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m glad to have my own parents, in-laws, siblings and children still healthy. Somehow my immediate household has been fairly steady in work, income, health and comfort for which I can only thank God and be amazed at His generosity toward me while others are suffering. I expect I should be doing more to think of them and not myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The project I wish to commence during my work break involves getting our detached garage correctly wired and updated. Right now the garage electrical circuit is fed by a piece of flying romex from the back porch light fixture. A switch in the kitchen effectively turns off all of the garage including the garage door openers… not cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I have in hand a building permit to run a circuit from the main house panel to a sub-box in the garage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The biggest obstacle will be getting the line through the basement wall which is approximately 12 inch thick limestone. I was looking around yesterday and it seems that all other modern utility entrances penetrate via the window frames or replaced window panes and don’t go through the stone. I think our gas service was the only one coming through the actual stone but that wasn’t completely uncovered so I couldn’t see the details. Adding to the difficulty is that some resident before us put up 2×4 studs, insulation and particle board finish on the inside of the basement walls in most places. And the exterior finish of the house is a molded concrete fake-stone pattern finish of indeterminate thickness. So my actual basement walls from air to air are probably 18 inches (?). It is very hard to see exactly what is happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think we will start by putting the boxes and wiring in the open-stud garage walls and get that all sorted out. Then we can do the wall penetrations and trench digging for the underground feed, which will be less than 20 ft I expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have a quote from a rock-drilling company to do the heavy work if I can’t figure it out myself. It would probably end up being about half of the total project cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Monday 12\/21: 4.4 miles ; Wednesday 12\/23: 4.4 miles; Thursday 12\/24: 6.1 miles; Friday 12\/25: 3.0 miles] With the winter holiday factory shutdown, I am off work between 12\/24 and 1\/04\/2021. We had a nice quiet day on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas. Today I hope to get started on a couple of projects […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7594"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7597,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7594\/revisions\/7597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}