Electrical Creativity

Yep, Brandon and Branson are back. We're 8 days into the enormous task of rewiring our house. Just today they found one more nob and tube, so back they went into the attic and the basement crawl space to thread new wire into the house. They continue to be cheerful, even tempered and hard working. I'm impressed.

Today, Branson was replacing our front door exterior light, which we'd bought at Lowe's, when he discovered that the twirly knob thingy at the top of the light wouldn't fit in the available space under the eaves. Back to Lowes for a different lamp?

"Could you turn it upside down? Would it fit then?" I asked.

Yes, it fitted.

"Well, let's do that," I suggested.

This is what it looks like:

If you really look at it, you can see that it's upside down, but I doubt anyone will ever notice.

Many years ago, my friend Bill taught me to try solving a problem by taking a different point of view. He's an American I met in England who spent a lot of time walking in London. The knots on his shoelaces rubbed his feet sore, so he relaced his shoes so the knot was at the toe end of the shoe instead of the ankle. Bingo! No more sore feet.

That was a lesson to me: Try solving a problem by turning it inside out, upside down, or on it's side.

However, there was one problem Bill couldn't solve. As anyone who has traveled there knows, there's a scarcity of public loos in England, and the easiest place to find one is a pub. So Bill would use a pub's toilet and then feel obliged to buy half a pint, which of course created the very problem he was hoping to solve.