Electrical Connections
From the youngest age we are trained to be wary of electricity, and yet it is truly ubiquitous, surrounding us in our homes and cars. You cannot go very far without encountering electricity. As naturally beautiful as my hilltop out here may be, if I stop to think about it, I am dependent on electricity in every corner of my new world. Out in the Cecil Garden I have an electric fountain that is WiFi controlled so that I can have it scheduled to come on and go off at convenient times to allow me the pleasure of tranquil running water without the bother of remembering to turn it on or off. All I have to do is remember every few days to put some extras water in it since between evaporation and splashing, it runs low regularly. It’s hard to forget about electricity while I am out there anyway since despite my elaborate camouflage with Bougainvillea vines, there is an entire 27 kilowatts of electricity storage on the garage wall with two Tesla batteries, an inverter and an electrical sub panel. You would never know it, but that represents my home electrical storm back-up system as well as my peak time energy deferral system. Now that we are getting late in the season, I decided to turn off the fountain and use the outlet to wire up timed Christmas lights that encircle the fountain and create a shape that is quite reminiscent of a cross. It was not intentional, but I may have found the true spirit of Christmas through my electrical connections.
As I explained in a prior story, so as not to overload myself, I have contracted with an landscape lighting firm to light my patio and driveway. I was actively involved in choosing the features I wanted lighted and used somewhat of a minimalist approach that concentrated on the natural beauty and downplayed the lighting of the “estate” or house. I suppose some might say that uplighting of the house is a good way to improve security, but what I see is a way to brag about your home. I feel our home, while perfect for us and quite lovely, is lovely mostly for its setting on the top of the hill and the lovely cactus gardens that surround it. My lighting will emphasize the boulders, specimen trees and artwork that we treasure. I have no need to show off the house, but am quite proud of the grounds and want the lighting to envelope our guests in a warm patio dining environment. To that end, I bought Japanese lantern path lights and went to the trouble to wire the two stone lanterns on either end of the path with low voltage fixtures. I felt like I was in sixth-grade wood shop making my pump-handle lamp. It was a bit more of challenge with low voltage because the normal low voltage fixtures are really cheap with simple two-prong or pressure sockets, but I managed to find small candelabra screw-in sockets for special low voltage LED bulbs and am very pleased with the warm light they shed from the lanterns.
While I am stopping short of lighting the deck just now since I prefer to wait until all that repair work is completed. There will be big doings to do then. But, I have decided to light the Otomi mural, created by my nephew Jason, on our Cecil Garden wall. We feel that some of the nicest aspects of our home are the artistic mosaic tiling in our kitchen, also done by my nephew Jason, and our Otomi mural that celebrates the quail, cacti and hummingbirds on our property. By the way, we took delivery today of our new mosaic patio table to act as highlight to our other patio furniture. That mosaic is called “Hummingbird” and it has eight hummingbirds making love to a dozen exotic flowers. It will be the highlight of our patio. That table and the Otomi mural anchor the two sides of our house and are lighted to show off their beauty night and day.
While I have chosen to phase my deck lighting until our deck is renovated, the one idea that I have decided to undertake myself is the lighting of my Tomoshevski standing eagle. That eagle, made of an old wood stump with a hammered copper head, crown and claws, sits on its perch on our Juliet balcony in its bronze gilded cage (the railing painted bronze), staring out at the expanse of chaparral between our hilltop and the Ocean. That seemed appropriate because we have a regular parade of soaring hawks that frequent that space. One even managed to soar onto our glass railed deck with his heavy pidgeon prey and became trapped in his own version of a gilded cage. He escaped, but left his pidgeon behind for me to dispose of. It has occurred to me that this eagle statue made of a combination of nature and metal is about three times life-sized and that is a perfectly proportionate fit with my three times life-sized Bison Boulder sculpture in process on my lower deck slope. The eagle will keep watch over the bison. While I will wait to light the bison, I have decided that the eagle cannot wait and can be undertaken by me. Today I bought a timer wall switch (I will want the eagle lighted every night by itself like my fountain), and an eyeball fixture to spotlight the eagle from the retrofitted overhead light can on the balcony. I am excited to do this myself, but realize that as a non-electrician, I will be toying with the hot wire with 110 volts. This is no landscape low-voltage lighting project, this is the real deal. That stuff that hides in our walls and yet is only two paper clips away from us at any moment.
And if all that electrical finagling is not enough, I have also decided to do my own Christmas lighting this year. I don’t know why this Chevy Chase National Lampoon Christmas Vacation need is welling up in me, but it has. It started today on the 150 white lights I wound around the fountain. It then moved to the two three-foot high artificial fir trees with white lights that I bought to place on either side of the entry gate pillars. My brilliant idea is to plug those lighted trees into the sockets in the entry pillars so that the dawn-to-dusk sensor will easily control the holiday lighting and still be only minimally challenging to install and, more importantly with Christmas lights, easily dismantled. Naturally, nothing is ever as easy as imagined and the socket plugs I bought at Lowe’s do not work and I need to return to Lowe’s for some sort of socket extenders to make it work. As with all electrical connections, easy is rarely quite that simple.
I have also purchased several lighting nets of white lights that operate from batteries with the added advantage of a simple timer as well. This is all for use if I get inspired to add to the simple holiday lighting concept I have already arranged. I’m thinking that these little nets are more disposable than not. As such, and because I will not have good lighting on my metal Joshua Tree statue on the back slope (the damn solar lights do almost nothing for the statue). I think that might be a perfect spot for a low-maintenance solution like a battery-operated, timer-controlled set of light nets. Easy-on, easy-off, no muss, no fuss. I think I got this electrical connection thing all figured out. What do you think?