Relative Something

With our temperatures well below zero these days, I figured it would be a good time to check out how easily I could split the cut logs that were here when we bought the place. It worked like a charm. If that doesn’t feel like the epitome of moving to the country: splitting some firewood by hand in the freezing cold.

Last night we snuggled by the warm fire in our main room. It was idyllic. We had finished bringing in the forgotten variety of left-over drink options from our open house in December, left to freeze in the garage in the extreme cold. Oops. With order restored, we enjoyed a lovely evening, computing on the couch together.

I finally got around to buying a new LED bulb for the light fixture by the front entrance. The old CFL bulb wasn’t a quick-start bulb and in the winter cold it took way too long to provide valuable luminescence. The new one works slick. Comes on right away. Even when it’s not supposed to. I accidentally moved the little switch on the housing that changes the setting for time delay to go dark after motion sense. Then, for some unexplainable reason, I found myself messing with the other switch, for the setting associated with the daylight sensor. Now I don’t know where they were set before, and I can’t seem to get the light to behave the way it used to.

I decided to go around to the back of our house and see how the identical fixture by our bedroom is set. It’s hard to see the text around the switch, because it is just raised lettering, the same color as the background, so I moved the switches back and forth to determine where they were set.

Now the back light won’t time-out and go dark anymore, either. It shouldn’t be as complicated for me as I seem to be able to make it.

The silliest thing about all this is that I have been trying repeatedly to figure out how to get the light to stay on all the time by “double flipping” the switch. Since the old bulb wouldn’t light up fast enough, when we were entertaining guests frequently over the holidays, I wanted to set the light to be on all the time. Regardless my efforts, it kept timing out and going dark.

It was so frustrating! I would flip the switch back and forth, but still, ten minutes later, it would be dark out there. If I stepped out in front of the sensor, it would trigger and the light would come on in a dim glow until the gas heated enough to illuminate. Then, after everybody was gone, or usually the next night when no company was coming, I’d flip it on a couple times and “BINGO!” Light stays on all the time. But, I was never able to get that to work when we actually needed it to.

Seems I’ve fixed that problem now.