Today we took the UKP’s to Snoqualmie Ski Resort to do some photos. Here is the most fun one I took. He’s not actually standing on the car, but it sure looked like it!
Snoqualmie
Month: December 2012
Alas, ’tis not to be…
Contacted the solar light people. “The panel needs 8 hours of direct, intense sunlight.” Well, you know what that means. Sending ’em back to Amazon. We might be able to use them in July, but…why?
And now I’ve got one ruined lint-free towel that I’d origami-folded and stitched into a sock for the solar panel. Grr.
AHA!
I’ll sew two surgical towels together to make a cover for the solar panel!
Lint-Free Towels…
…a complete myth!
I always, always, always get little strings of lint on my face, and more specifically in my eyes, after washing and drying my face. I even keep a tweezers and a 15x magnification mirror on the countertop so I can find them as soon as I’m done drying, and get rid of them before they get into my eyes. (We won’t discuss the horror of seeing this aging face at 15x magnification. I try to ignore that part of it.)
Chris recently suggested lint-free towels. A wise idea, or so we thought.
I browsed around Amazon, always my first stop for these sorts of weird specialty items. Found a lot of choices! And every choice talked about how they were great for “car washing” or “window washing” or other household tasks. Even though some were called “surgical towels,” which sounded promising, all the reviewers had been using them for cleaning tasks. “Get them anyway,” the Man said, “they’re not that expensive, and they might work.” So I did, and they got here yesterday, and I laundered them.
I’m sure you all realize, by now, the total fallacy here. Maybe the towels are lint-free, but the rest of my laundry isn’t. They came out of the dryer covered in lint. Just by folding them, lint flew off and got in my eye. It’s still there now! I can’t see to remove it, but boy, I can feel it.
(Yes, Mom. I was folding laundry.)
My next task will be to wash and dry them in their own special laundry cycle, if I ever get caught up on the Real Laundry. However, I’m not entirely hopeful. We may have just purchased ourselves 12 car wash rags.
In other news…
The solar lighting company tells us the solar panel has to be completely blacked out while the lights are on, or else if it senses ambient light it will keep storing energy and not turning the lights on. Since it’s midafternoon here, I can’t test it, but we will do that tonight, and post A Report.
Hope Springs Eternal
We have never put outdoor Christmas lights up, just because we don’t feel the electricity expenditure is worth it. After all, we do live at the end of a dead end. Three other people might see our decorations (not counting our visitors).
Well, this year we decided to do it, since we’d only need one little string of lights to go on our tiny box hedge. Chris said “Only if there’s a ground fault receptacle outside,” and of course there isn’t. Not out front. Putting lights in the back yard would be pure idiocy, so we researched solar lighting.
In Seattle.
Yes, it sounds idiotic, but we got some and set up the solar panel, and damn if it didn’t get sunny five minutes later and stay sunny all afternoon! We were all very excited. When it got dark I went out and turned on the lights, and they looked great…for about three minutes. By the time I yelled, “Hey, Chris! Come look at the lights!” and he’d come over, they’d gone out.
I can be flexible. I can attribute this to the fact that they’d only had three hours of sunlight before it got dark, and I can be hopeful for tomorrow.
Then, later, I went out and cycled the power switch off and then on again, and they lit up. “Hey, Chris! The lights are back on!”
Chris got up and hustled to the front door and they’d already gone out. Now he thinks I’m doing this just to make him run around the house. But I wasn’t! (Though it was amusing.) Next time I’ll take my camera outside to get hard evidence.
And in the meantime, I’m hoping tomorrow is another sunny day.
The US Picks 