I Am Blessed!

Ever notice how that when you start a "small" project around the house, it tends to grow? A few days ago we noticed the lights in the bathroom kept dimming. I could not figure out what was suddenly making the pull on the electricity. Sometimes they were dim, other times they were not. I just could not figure it out. Then I went down into the basement one evening about dusk and did not turn on the lights. That was a break, because as I went into the second room of the basement I noticed a small orange-red dot near the ceiling. I walked over to it and it was a conduit pipe for the electricity. I traced the line and sure enough, it went to the bathroom. For those who do not know, we live in one of those big old houses that is about 125 years old, and not all of the electricity has been redone. Long story short, I ripped into it this week and to my surprise I found that this line fed the bathroom, half the kitchen, the dining room, the light in the utility room, the stair well lights, one of the basement lights and the porch lights out back. So, a simple patch became a job and a half. I've run four new breakers and lines to each of these areas. I've worked on it for 3 days and still not quite finished because we decided to rip out some of the lines and putting a new set of lights in the stair well. This stair well light has been a trip. The reason I decided to rip the lines out is that no matter what I did, it made no sense and the lights did not work. When I ripped them out, I figured it out. Someone had used a neutral wire for a hot wire, so no matter what I was doing, it was tripping a breaker. 

Late this afternoon I decided to take a break from the electrical work and hopped on my mower to mulch my leaves. Again, if you've not seen our house, you cannot comprehend the amount of leaves. One year I counted and we bagged up 68 bags of mulched leaves. So I generally hit them with the mower first and then will use my leaf blower to pile and bag them. On my third trip around the yard, I hit a brick that was buried in the leaves. It belongs around the garden area in front of the house, but someone had taken it out of it's spot and tossed it out in the yard. Tore a blade up bad, so now I'm getting ready to head to Menards or Walmart... again. This will be my third trip to Menards today and probably the 10th one this week. But you know what? I'm blessed. I have a roof over my head, and thank God I have been taught to do some of the things that would have cost me thousands of dollars to hire someone to do. I'm thankful that God has given me the strength and health to do these things... even though my old body is aching in places that I forgot could ache. Yeah... it's a pain sometimes to deal with all the hassles of life... but man, life is so good, and I've been blessed! (And I'm particularly blessed that we've not seen snow like that picture yet this year!)