The Path To Enlightenment

The Path To Enlightenment

We spent the day doing errands and driving around with MSNBC on full blast. When we were home we were glued by eye or at lest ear to the TV and cable news. The path to political enlightenment just happens to wander through the land of the pundits and pollsters and even if we didn’t care for MSNBC, which we do, we would have to be tuned into Steve Kornacki and his vote counting machinations. As of this moment the open tickets remain predominantly Pennsylvania, Georgia (now certain to go to recount), Arizona and Nevada. Technically, the swing state list includes North Carolina and Alaska, but no serious blue supporter honestly believes those two will end in anything other than Trump’s electoral vote count. But the other four are more than enough in many multiple permutations to give Joe Biden a clear and broad path to the 270 count needed to secure the election result. Trump, on the other hand, is seeing his path to 270 requiring wins in almost all of those states and that path has narrowed to a mountain goat path (and a small goat at that) and a very crumbly path with pieces falling off the cliff every moment as new mail-in vote counts are coming in. Those mail votes strongly favor Biden as Trump Pooh-poohed mail-in voting in favor of in-person voting. That netted him the early count, but has meant that he has little or no share of the mail-in ballots. The math has largely closed in on Trump and yet he has done what we all suspected he would do, which is barricading himself behind denials and recriminations. Besides the obvious claims of fraud and unfair treatment which have been denigrated by just about anyone including members of his own party and even some of his own administration, he has been lashing out at anyone who is not standing up and vocalizing their agreement with his distorted view of the election and the world. Rupert Murdock has hung up on him and I imagine many others are just not answering the caller ID that says POTUS. The path that Biden has had to tread is the one of care and patience in keeping with his kinder, gentler and more rational persona that we have all seen him wear during much of this campaign.

But as much as those paths have occupied my and everyone in the free worlds’ consciousness, that is not the path of enlightenment that I have been working on today. Today I decided to task Handy Brad, who has returned to work after a three-day hiatus while our guests were here, to install the five German pathway lamps I have bought along with installing LED sockets and wiring into the two zen stone lanterns on either end of the path. While I was talking to three different landscape lighting designers, I decided that low-voltage path lighting is about as DIY-friendly as any homeowner project that can be undertaken. I had ordered the best pathway lamps on the market. These are ones that match the Japanese lantern and zen look and feel that my patio and Cecil Garden have adopted. I have curved teak benches that are very zen. I have twenty-three bonsai trees of varying sizes with one more zen than the next. I have two stone Japanese lanterns and one Japanese pagoda. I have a large zen-like Samurai statue that stands eight-feet tall with its stacked stone and stainless steel curved blades that arch toward the sky. And I have a large steel and Ipe wood palapa that has a decided Japanese fan shape to it. Add that to our specimen Madagascar Bottle Tree that looks like a gigantic and artful bonsai of its own and you have what they call in the design world, a “theme”. So, I decided to follow that theme with the path lights flanked on either end with the two stone lanterns.

My first mission before Kim and I headed out to do our errands was to give adequate instruction to Handy Brad. He needs me to be very specific so I try to oblige. I started by pacing off the exact placement of the five path lights between the lanterns. I had placed them on in to show him how I thought they should juxtapose the path. He set out marker stones at each location because he is nothing if not aiming to please accurately. We then took some time to discuss how the sockets and bulbs I had bought would work in the lanterns. We discussed exactly how to install the lamps and then discussed the trenching of the low-voltage wiring. At the end of this string of seven lights I had an excess-capacity transformer that we agreed he would try to hook up since the power was easy to shut off and thus didn’t really need Electrician Bob to do the hook-up. The biggest challenge was to decide the wiring schematic and the need to reawaken my nine-grade earth science self to remember the flow for a parallel versus series installation. I started with the simpler series approach (these were no Christmas lights and would not be that hard to forensically analyze any outage), but then I watched a You-Tube video that listed NOT using a series wiring scheme as the #1 installation mistake made by rookie DIYers. I scratched out that drawing and redrew it as a parallel schematic. I then belt and suspenders the situation for Handy Brad by cutting to lengths of low-voltage #14 gauge wire and went through the cuts needed to wire up the schematic I had drawn. Handy Brad’s biggest concern was that I might cut off my thumb, but he did appreciate the show and tell.

When I got home Brad actually had the lights on to show me how they looked. The end-of-the-line lantern could not be turned on since the connectors were too big to work. But the rest of the lamps and the other lantern were on. They were hooked to the transformer but Handy Brad had plugged it into an outlet (leaving extra lengths of wire to accommodate whatever installation I ultimately decided on). I feel very good about the job that was done. The path lights and the one lantern look great. I have ordered for next-day Amazon delivery a few added parts to fix the issues that need adjustment (smaller connectors and different sockets for the lanterns). Mostly, I have a good-looking DIY improvement to show the designers that they had better be reasonable in their proposals since I am proving myself capable of forging my own path to enlightenment in a landscape sense. I like the leverage that might give me with these two meetings, set up for Monday and Wednesday nights.

The South African designer coming on Monday is bringing a drone photographer and sample portable lights to show us how his various lighting schemes will look. I plan to be very impressed by the look and feel he proposes, but I also want him to respect my ability to do first-rate DIY work as an alternative if he goes too crazy with the pricing plan. While Joe Biden works hard to clear our national path to enlightenment, I will do my part between the driveway and patio.