November 30, 2006. . .

Offering

I needed to give you something. An offering. So I brought out a few things from my private treasure box. This and that I found along the way, that reached me where no one ever has, and I kept for myself. My own private gold and silver. It had to be something from there. Something for you. Something worthy.

Stars bigger than the orbit of Saturn. Clouds of ice and dust so big light from when I was born hasn’t seen the other side yet. Secret places tucked in the folds of dust between Orion and Betelgeuse, where new born stars emerge, perhaps one day to beckon new life into the universe. Galaxies, wheeling, colliding, dancing. Spirals. Barred. Ellipticals. And those small faintly glowing red ones, like beacons shimmering on a distant horizon, their light shining into my eyes from near the beginning of time.

They lifted me. They struck the silence into me. So did you once. So I gave them to you. An offering.

Please give me back a sign.

Well…I got my sign alright. Eventually.

I must remember living in my little narrow and vertical Baltimore rowhouse, to keep the upstairs doors closed when it gets hot outside. And close a select few of the vents downstairs to force more AC air upstairs, especially now that I have this super efficient AC unit that always tries to run the fan and the compressor at the lowest possible speeds.

You live in one of these…it has to be really narrow and vertical…and it really makes you pay attention to how hot air rises and cool air sinks. After I came back from my Disney vacation and got the house reawakened I was wondering why the upstairs wasn’t cooling down while the rest of the house was pretty chill. And then I remembered. Oh yes…I spent most of my life in a series of apartments and I’m still getting use to how a multi-level home behaves.

Nice thing about this one is every major room has both exhaust and intake vents. So I can close all the doors and still have circulation. That’s not all that common anymore in new construction.

The diffusers in my other tiki lights came apart at my barest touch. Plus for some reason the light output of those (they’re a little different) is way down. So I ordered a set of new ones. Hopefully they arrive this weekend.

It looks like the flame effect isn’t digital as I’d thought. Instead it looks like they use randomly blinking leds behind a light baffle, something like was used in the old motion lamps (I have two of them), to generate the effect of a flickering flame.

I waited until after my Disney vacation to really did into getting my backyard lights up, but now it’s time. This is a project I begin every June and which usually takes several days because inevitably some will need repairing. For example: the tiki torch lights, some of which are over ten years old now…way past their expected lifespan of just one season and next year buy new ones (these things are made Very cheaply), and I’m a fix instead of buy new kinda guy.

At the end of last season the diffuser in one of the older set of tiki lights just came apart in my hands as I took the light apart to get the batteries out. The diffuser is a cylindrical piece of translucent plastic that helps with the illusion that the flickering led bulbs inside of it are actually a torch flame, and the plastic it was made of became brittle over the years. It just fell apart when I took it off the lamp to get to the batteries. When that happened I made a mental note to replace it somehow next year.

So now it’s Next Year and I pick the lamp up out of its storage container and remember…oh yeah…I need to replace that. But with what? I could go to the hardware store and get a thin sheet of translucent plastic but heat bending it into a cylinder wasn’t something I wanted to get into unless there was no other way. I actually have experience doing that from the time I worked at a custom plastic fabrication shop.

So I’m thinking and thinking. I start looking through my spare parts but nothing good comes to mind. Then I remember I have bunches of semi transparent drafting paper I could easily cut and bend into the correct shape. Oh…but no…it’ll get wet and soggy when it rains. I thought about it some more. Oh yes…I have some clear urethane spray I can coat it with. Hopefully that keeps rain off the paper.

It won’t be a perfect solution because the one lamp will probably look a bit different from the other, but hopefully not too much different. I’ll give it a test tonight.

Eventually I’m going to want to replace the tiki lamps with newer ones that project a really convincing illusion of flickering flame, but I am stubborn. I think the way the lights I have now work is charming. One set has two amber led lights inside, only one of which flickers off and on and the effect is actually pretty convincing for something so simply done, which is why I really like these more than the newer ones that are projecting an image of a flame. I have always been a big fan of practical special effects over CGI.