The Little Things

Today my only real job was to wire the new Oven. Not a big deal as I know enough about electricity to be careful and keep myself out of big trouble. The wiring harness that comes from the new oven was standard 240 volt - white (neutral), black (L1) and red (L2) along with the standard bare copper ground wire. The old oven however had five wires going to it - green, white, red, yellow and beige (maybe orange - it is faded). I stapled all these wires to a board to minimize sparks, flipped the breaker on and started testing. The green was obviously ground as it was tied down to the oven cabinet. One down. The white turned out to be neutral as it should be. Two down. The yellow tested out to be one of the "hot" leads and the beige the other. I got 120 volts between the white and the yellow and 120 between the white and beige. Beige to yellow gave me 240 volts so that proved everything I needed to make the new oven work. I have no idea what the red was for and really did not care so I turned the breaker back off and taped up the red and put it aside. The cable from the new oven was too short to reach the box that the old oven was wired from so I installed a new box at the end of the new BX cable and ran the old BX cable that used to go to the old oven to my new box and connected everything together. It may not be "code" color wise, but it works and it is safe. I still have no idea where those colors came from. If anyone knows, let me know.

Kitchen Chores

When we bought the house in 1989 we installed a new Maytag dishwasher. It has served us well for twenty years and was still working but obviously reaching the end of it's dishwasher life span. The wall oven that sits directly above it was in the house when we bought it and is of unknown vintage. Norma was complaining that it had "cold spots" inside and did not bake properly. She may have been using some creativity in her description because she has been hinting for a modern stainless steel oven for some years now. We are also thinking of replacing the linoleum kitchen floor with tiles and that would raise the floor level so much that it would make it difficult to remove the dishwasher. Now was the time!

A week or so ago we went out and invested some of the family fortune on brand new stainless steel replacements, Maytag for the dishwasher and GE for the oven. We worked all day Wednesday on getting the old appliances out of their tight little cubbyhole. It was quite a struggle with a little cursing and a few cuts on the hands but they finally ended up on the driveway and Norma found a job of cleaning the old space of 25 or 30 years of dust, crumbs, cobwebs, various droppings and even one warfarin impregnated little four legged corpse(!) These little critters are not rare if you live near the sea and every once in a while we find traces of them in the crawl space. We set out bait and that is the end of them. This guy was searching for a quiet place to croak and managed to get up through the hole cut in the floor for the plumbing of the dishwasher. I did not need Las Vegas CSI to tell me he had been there for a very long time. Yuk!

Yesterday we started installing the new units. It was a tight squeeze but they went in. The dishwasher, although having a larger interior capacity than the old one was actually a bit smaller outside than it's predecessor. This is in thanks to most part to more efficient insulation and the fact that the motor compartment is much smaller. The cutout in the cabinets was not quite deep enough so I cut out the drywall behind it and shaved an inch off the studs in the now exposed wall. This gave me what I needed and allowed for better air circulation behind the units. I then built a 2 X 4 frame around the dishwasher to support the wall oven that went in next. It was a much tighter squeeze but it finally went in as well.

The dishwasher is done except for a few screws that go in around the open door frame to hold it in place and then the oven has to be wired. The cable that came attached to the new oven does not quite reach the electrical box so I will have to do some inventive wiring. That, along with testing everything, is today's project. The final oak trim will wait a few days as we have a wedding to go to on the weekend. I need a vacation!

Arco Norte Part Two

It appears that the Mexican SCT or Secretariat Of Communications and Transportation, has kept their promise to complete the Arco Norte by the end of July. This new system of modern high speed highways will allow a traveler to bypass Mexico City to the North. We can now exit Mex 57D just south of Queretaro and join Mex 150D just west of Puebla. All information is in Spanish of course but it appears that the highway is 223 Km long and has twelve toll plazas. Toll for the section from Queretaro to Puebla will be about $50 - $60 USA which, believe me, is cheap.

The Government has placed a map on the Internet here: Link The dots in yellow are working Casitas (toll booths) and the ones in gray are still under construction. This site is in Spanish but a I did a little digging around in it and came up with this Google Map complete with a short video of the route. Now if I could only figure out how to save the map...

The map is not very detailed but gives the general idea. The highway also extends past Queretaro to the West to bypass the awkward area around Toluca that we found our way through last year, which you can read about here.

Here is a link to my previous post on Arco Norte: Link

Birthday Party!

Saturday night was Norma's Birthday Party. Brooks and Linda drove up from Victoria with Jayde and Sierrah and many friends dropped over. Jayde counted 27 guests throughout the evening. It was a beautiful day with the temperature hovering around 30 degrees until the sun went down. We then lit up the patio heater that Brooks and Linda bought us a few weeks ago and it took enough of the chill off that everything was very comfortable. It is so nice to have a large outside area where everyone can relax and visit. It was a great time! Thanks everyone! I will be eating leftovers for a couple of days.

That is Norma at the bottom right getting her cake served by Jayde and Sierrah (with Linda the cake baker watching).

Busy As A Bee

Everybody's working in the garden!


Click on the photo for a closeup.

Not bad but it would have been a lot better if I had used my tripod! But then again, the bee might not have had enough patience for that.

Happy Days Are Here Again!

The optimists at the Bank Of Canada have declared an end to the recession in Quarter 3! The TSE rose sharply by 243 points today on this news. They also declared that the recovery in Canada would be faster and higher than in it would be in the USA. This news also caused the Loonie to rise to $.92 to the USA dollar. What does this mean? It means we are going to have a really good time in Mexico this winter. It means I will be able to take some profits out of the market soon and pay off my line of credit where the new motorhome has been sitting for 16 months. It means we can replace the stove and dishwasher. Happy days are here again!

Now we wait to see if they know what they are talking about.



And in the meantime.... Una cerveza, por favor..

White Rose

Norma has been unsuccessful in producing white roses this year This one is from the archives but has a timeless beauty. It was taken with my old Nikon FE2 and Tokina Macro lens on Fuji Velvia film (remember film?) and scanned into a TIFF file. If you click on it you will see a few dust specs introduced in the scanning process. Things are so much easier now that we are in the digital age!

Merida Flowers Show

Our friends Jonna and Mimi in Merida have been posting some fantastic shots of their lilies and orchids on their Blog. They had some water gardens and planters included in their house design and the results are nothing less than spectacular! Do yourself a favor and have a look at their site.

Jonna's photography has spurred me on to take more photos of my own in the garden.

Patio Inspiration

We used to have a six person hot tub. Back in the early 90's when it was new we used it a lot, at least three or four times a week, but as the years passed it saw less and less use. At the end it got to the point that it hardly ever got used. The granddaughters liked it when they visited in the summer but other than that Norma and I only used it a couple of times a year. It got hard to justify the waste of electricity and the high chemical costs to keep it going, never mind the maintenance. When the pump failed a year ago and we were given a $1000 estimate for repairs it was just the excuse we were looking for and we had it hauled away to the dump. This gave us the use of the 12 X 12 cement deck it was sitting on. We have since built a pergola over this deck and it is where my Yucatan hammock swings.

This left the upper patio with the old hot tub wiring sticking up out of the cement. I could not think of anything to do with it so it just stayed there waiting to be tripped over. Yesterday inspiration struck. I made a box 17 inches high out of left over cedar fence boards and wired in a patio light, switch and outlet. It is the perfect height for my glass of red wine to rest on between sips! Life Is Good!

Roses

I posted these with Picasa rather than with Windows Live Writer. Picasa allows a much larger file to be uploaded and you can see the results of this if you click on one of the flowers. The yellow rose works best.

Both photos were taken with my Nikon D70S and Tamron 90mm "True" Macro lens.