Existence

First there was the Big Bang. Hydrogen and helium were created. Gravitational forces caused these primordial gases to condense into stars and galaxies. Massive stars burned fiercely and then exploded, spewing into the cosmos heavier elements produced inside those stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, formed. Our solar system formed. Earth formed, molten and barren. Comets brought water and perhaps seeded life on Earth. Plants created oxygen in the atmosphere, making possible animal life. Living things evolved.

And then the most surprising thing happened – surprising to me, at least. One fine Saturday morning, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, I was born. At the time, I didn’t know about the Big Bang nor about the 13.8 billion years between it and me. But now I do know, and I think about it. I ask myself, “What took me so long to get down to the business of being born?”

For 13,798,000,000 years, plus or minus 37 million years, I didn't exist. Then, on a seemingly random morning, I suddenly existed. I opened my eyes and found myself in the world. Why that particular morning and not another morning? Why not a hundred years earlier, or a hundred years later? Or a thousand years earlier or later? Or ten thousand years? Why not a billion years ago on a different planet? Why that particular day on this particular planet?

It occurs to me that maybe I didn’t wait 13.8 billion years to have a life, and it only appears that I did.

When I was small, I felt sure my existence did not begin with my birth. I felt sure I had existed somewhere before I was born. It was like a memory of a memory. At times I felt I could almost remember that existence. Almost.

Jack London (The Call of the Wild, White Fang) said, "I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born."

Well put, Jack.

So here I am, right now. For some unfathomable reason, I exist at this point in space and time. For a little while, I exist, and I wonder. I wonder about questions without answers.

Voltaire said, “It is no more surprising to me to be born twice than it is to be born once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

He was right. Being born is very surprising. If it is possible to be born once, why not twice? Why not any number of times?

In Through A Glass Darkly, General George Patton wrote,

“Perhaps I stabbed our Savior, In His sacred helpless side.
Yet I've called His name in blessing When in after times I died.”

In the same poem he wrote,

“So as through a glass and darkly, The age long strife I see,
Where I fought in many guises, Many names – but always me.”

Little wonder he was such an outstanding warrior, with all those lifetimes of practice.

Henry Ford said, "I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives.”

I'm not a philosopher. I just write commentary. But what Henry Ford said: I don't doubt it for a second.

Second Snowfall

Snow falls in the dark outside my window. The temperature is 18° out there, and it’s been below freezing all day, so every flake sticks to the ground. The yard and street are already a sheet of white. It’s the second snowfall we’ve had in a week. The previous snowfall was six days ago. I blogged about it here.

Yesterday’s high temperature was 70°. Yes, yesterday. Tonight’s low will be 14°. Tomorrow (Wednesday) night the low will be 10°. But this weekend we’ll be above 50°. Crazy.

The thermostat is set at 67° and the house is colder than I like. I used to turn the heat down at night and back up in the morning, but that made the heat run a long time every morning. So I began wondering if I was really saving money. This winter, I set it to 67° and left it there.

Last night I put a pork loin into my slow cooker, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, added a cup of vinegar, and set the cooker to low (which, for a slow cooker, is still pretty hot, but not boiling hot). This morning I awoke to find the house filled with the delicious aroma of pork barbeque. I removed the loin  from the cooker and put it on a platter and pulled the meat apart with a pair of forks. To the liquid in the slow cooker – mostly vinegar – I added brown sugar, hot sauce, and red pepper flakes. I stirred it and poured some of it over the pulled pork and mixed it in. Then I put some of the freshly made ‘cue on a bun and topped it with slaw before adding the other half of the bun. Was it good? Oh, yeah! I don’t think it’s possible to make bad barbecue. But you can sure mess it up with bad barbecue sauce.

It’s 11 PM. I’ll hit the Publish button and then watch some toob for a while. A thought: TVs don’t  have tubes in them now, so can I still call the TV a toob? Hmm. I guess I can. I doubt “Let’s watch some flatscreen” will ever catch on.

Don’t ‘Cute Me, Bro

This is a bit of electrical trivia I ran across:

Electrocute means to injure or kill with electricity. You can be electrocuted and survive.

Electrocution means to kill with electricity. After electrocution, you're dead.

Electrocution a is portmanteau word derived from "electrical execution", and it originally applied only to intentional death, not accidents or suicides. However, there being no word for non-judicial death by electricity, the word came to be used for those deaths as well.

Only two countries have used electrocution as a means of capital punishment. One is the United States, where it was invented, and which adopted it for capital punishment around 1900. The other country is the Philippines, which adopted it in 1924 under US occupation, and used it until 1979.

Electrocution is now almost obsolete and is used in only 4 states: Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia.

The electric chair was last used on January 16, 2013, when Robert Gleason was executed in Virginia.

I'm a little surprised it's not used in Texas. It doesn't surprise me at all that it's still used in Virginia.

Global Warming

The Earth is getting warmer, and the consensus of scientific opinion is that there is at least a 95% probability that human activity (burning fossil fuels, deforestation) is to blame. Maybe we should hope they’re right.

You see, there is a thing called an ice age. Between ice ages, Earth’s polar regions are free of ice. During an ice age, or more precisely a glacial age, Earth’s surface cools and ice forms at the poles and advances toward the equator. There is geological evidence that strongly suggests that Snowball Earth events have occurred during one or more ice ages. During a Snowball Earth event, Earth’s entire surface, including its oceans, is covered by ice.

Ice ages last a long time. The most severe ice age of the last billion years was the Cryogenian which occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago and may have produced a Snowball Earth. However, only single-cell bacteria lived on Earth at that time. The current ice age, called the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, started 2.58 million years ago. Since then, ice sheets have advanced and retreated on 40,000 to 100,000 year time scales.

Within an ice age, there are colder periods in which ice sheets advance. These colder periods are called glacials or glacial advances. Also within an ice age are warmer periods in which ice sheets retreat. These warmer periods are called interglacials or glacial retreats. Glacial advances last a long time, whereas interglacials are shorter. The last glacial period ended more than 11,000 years ago. The Earth is currently in an interglacial period called the Holocene. How long will the Holocene last? No one knows for certain. We know the last interglacial (prior to the current one) lasted for 12,000 years.

It was the end of the last glacial advance and the advent of the current interglacial that allowed human civilization to arise and flourish. Agriculture became possible, and with it civilizations arose. Civilizations gave birth to art, religion, science, writing, mathematics, technology, industry: almost everything we have today. It’s all possible because of the long interglacial warm period in which we happen to be living.

When the current interglacial ends, it could mean the end of civilization, or it could mean the end of us. Humankind would probably not survive a Snowball Earth event. But even a less severe glacial advance would severely strain our ability to survive. Supplies of fresh water would freeze solid, crops would fail, livestock would die. Humanity might be thrown back to a Stone Age existence.  During the most recent glacial advance, the area of the United States now known as New York City was covered by a one mile thick sheet of ice. Clearly, another glacial advance is something we want to avoid.

However, humankind is not without hope. If human activity can influence the climate, and if we choose to act wisely, we may be able to avoid another glacial advance. If we can warm the Earth by our own activity, then we’re safe, are we not? We won’t freeze.

But hold on. Some climate scientists think that if polar ice melts too quickly it may generate enough fresh water to disrupt the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream carries warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to Europe, keeping northwestern Europe temperate. Disrupting the Gulf Stream would throw northwestern Europe into a deep freeze. If other ocean currents were also disrupted, it could trigger a worldwide glacial advance.

Another scenario is a runaway greenhouse effect. In this event, a positive feedback between Earth’s surface temperature and atmospheric opacity increases the strength of the greenhouse effect until the oceans boil away. This is believed to have happened in the early history of Venus. The IPCC says there is virtually no chance of this event being induced on Earth by human activity. So we’re safe from that – unless the IPCC is wrong.

If we tip the Earth’s climate out of its present ice age, the polar regions will become ice free. An ice free Earth will be a catastrophe for many humans. Sea levels would rise more than 200 feet, drowning coastal areas and low-lying islands – and the entire state of Florida. But it seems to be the kind of catastrophe that the human race and civilization could probably survive. The world would be different, of course, but we could still grow food, have access to fresh water, and live in cities – things that are difficult to do under a mile of ice.

So here is where things stand: we are living in an interglacial warm period which, at some point, will likely end. We need to avoid another glacial advance, which means it is desirable that we are able to warm the planet’s surface, but not so fast that we inadvertently tip the climate into another glacial advance, nor so warm that it triggers a runaway greenhouse effect, assuming such an outcome is possible. To do that, we need to know what human activities cause global warming and precisely how much impact those activities have on Earth’s climate. We need to know how much warming is enough, how much is too much, and how fast is too fast.

All things considered, I’m glad there are smart people working diligently to find answers to our climate questions, and I’m prepared to listen and give careful thought to what they have to say.

As for the scoffers, let me put it to you a different way. Suppose you were preparing to drive a heavy vehicle across a small wooden bridge, and then you discovered that the majority of bridge engineers were predicting the bridge would collapse under you, ending your life. Would you, without doing any math, without doing any computer modeling, without knowing anything about the science of bridge design, simply say, “Nah. I don’t believe it. I’m going.”? Because if that is your response, it means you’re in denial, and that is not a good place to be, whether it’s your own personal future or humanity’s future that is on the line.

Beaver In The News

I often work at my computer with the TV news going in the background. My eyes stay focused on my computer monitor while my ears stay tuned into current events. Lately, the news announcers have been spending a lot of time talking about some beaver named Justin. It's Justin Beaver this, Justin Beaver that. Apparently this rodent is a "singing beaver" and was imported from Canada. It's a singing, Canadian beaver. Now I'm as big a fan of musical beavers as the next animal lover, but why is this rodent in the news so much? Can it predict when winter will end, like Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog?

I was recently disturbed to hear on the news that this beaver was arrested in Miami for drunk driving. I have two comments. First, no one should give alcohol to an animal. That is animal cruelty. Second, what in the world was someone thinking to allow a drunken beaver to get behind the wheel of an expensive sports car? In an emergency, how would a beaver get its hind paw on the brake pedal at the same time its front paws are on the steering wheel? Beavers just aren’t that big.

I can't shake the feeling that there's a part of this beaver story that I am missing.

First Snowfall

Two inches of snow fell here last night. This is the first snowfall of the year. At first the flakes melted when they hit the ground, but after a while the snow began “sticking” as they say, which could be short for “sticking around.” The wind was blowing about 25 miles an hour. I went outside to check that the crawlspace entrance was still covered, protecting the pipes from the artic air. The wind whipped plumes of icy flakes off rooftops and flung them into my face – a very uncomfortable feeling. The air was bitterly cold and well below freezing at 18°F (-8°C).

Today’s high temperature never got above freezing.  At 4 PM, it’s 28°. Tonight’s low will be 8°. There are colder places on earth, but I don’t reside in those places, and I’m not happy that the cold air from those places has come to visit my neighborhood.

Snow is not unusual in winter in central Virginia. When I was a boy the snow would regularly fall six or eight inches deep. Sometimes during the day the sun would melt the top of the snow and at night it would refreeze, causing a slick, icy crust to form. The crust was thick enough to support my weight, so I could walk on the snow without sinking into it.

One week when I lived in Richmond, it snowed fifteen inches on a Tuesday. The snowplow came along and buried my car. I spent several hours digging it out of the snow. Then two days later it snowed another twelve inches, and the snowplow came by and buried my car again.

Kids love snow. They love to watch it fall and they love to go outside and play in the snow. What surprises me is that dogs love snow. Why would a dog care about snow? Is it the novelty? Why do they love romping in it? I believe even sled dogs who are accustomed to snow still love it.

A few years ago I blogged about a diary entry I wrote decades ago. I wasn’t a child when I wrote the diary entry. I was in my twenties. Perhaps I should pull up that blog post and read it again. Ah, here it is: Me and My Shadow.

The Gremlin Manifestation

Maybe there really is a gremlin around here.

My Jeep has a Vehicle Information Center – VIC for short. It’s a small display located between the dashboard and driveshaft hump. It tells me when to change the oil, tells me when a door is ajar, tells me when an exterior light bulb is burned out, and so on. Last week, the VIC decided that the driver’s door is always open, even when the door is solidly closed. When I drive the Jeep now, the VIC flashes a warning at me and beeps to make sure I notice it.

Then on Sunday, the picture on my big-screen TV started flickering like a strobe light. (This is the same TV set I repaired two years ago.) The screen flickered for a few seconds and then went dark, and an acrid smell filled the room. It was the unmistakable odor of toasted electronics.

But I think the gremlin has moved on. The heating oil truck came to my house today to deliver #2 heating oil to my storage tank. I always talk to the drivers while they’re pumping oil into my tank. Sometimes they have interesting tales to tell. Today the driver told me what he had experienced a few minutes earlier in another part of town.

As he drove up a street looking for the delivery address, he saw what he thought was someone burning leaves. That would be a crazy thing to do. The day was moderately breezy and the burning leaves were blowing down the street and setting other fires. Also, burning leaves is not necessary; all a resident has to do is rake his leaves to the gutter, and the city will dispose of them.

But as he got closer, he realized no one was burning leaves. A large delivery van, taller than his fuel oil truck, had come along and, unbeknownst to its driver, had snagged an overhead power line. The power line pulled taut, then snapped, and one end fell into a yard where electrical sparks set fire to grass and leaves in the yard. Then the truck turned a corner and the line it was still dragging snagged a corner of a roof and tore off shingles. At that point the driver realized something was wrong. He stopped and got his fire extinguisher and began trying to put out the grass fire. Electric power in the neighborhood was knocked out, and the fire department got involved. The oil truck driver said he was about to get out and help fight the grass fire, but then he thought it might not be a good idea to leave his fuel oil truck parked where a fire was in progress.

For the owner of the house that lost shingles, it was insult added to injury. The previous week a teenage girl driving on his street had gotten distracted while texting on her phone and drove her car off the road and into the side of his house.

Someone please feed the gremlin so it will go away.

Samsara

I may have been 10 or 12 years old when I read The Search For Bridey Murphey by Morey Bernstein. I found it fascinating. A few years later I read the story of 13-year-old Lurancy Vennum and found it equally fascinating. Whether as a result of that, or whether it would have happened anyway, I developed a lifelong interest in reincarnation and life after death – or Life After Life, as psychologist Raymond Moody would put it. Over the years and decades that followed, I read dozens of books containing many accounts of reincarnation, near death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), and after death communications (ADCs). For the most part, these lifelong interests occurred after the incident I describe here.

One day, forty years ago, I took a course in TM – Transcendental Meditation. I had a specific reason for learning TM – a life problem with which I was wrestling at the time. I questioned whether TM would help me, but I wanted to try it anyway. Learning TM was a leave-no-stone-unturned kind of thing.

I resolved to meditate every morning and every evening for one year to see what, if any, difference it made in my life. A few months passed. One day as I sat meditating, the word samsara popped into my head. I dismissed it and returned to my mantra, but samsara continued to pop back into my head when I didn’t want it there. I suspected it was Sanskrit but I didn’t know what it meant. At that time there was no Google (nor even an Internet). Though I was curious about what the word meant, or if it was even a real word, I wasn’t curious enough to go to a library and research it.

Fast forward to the present and we have the Internet and search engines, so I can easily research the word. Samsara is the Westernized version of the Sanskrit word संसार. The word refers to the endless cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth (reincarnation) which humans and all other mortal beings must endure, according to the beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, and some other eastern religions. According to those beliefs, the only escape from this endless cycle is to achieve the highest state of enlightenment.

I will leave the reader to pursue his or her own enlightenment. I simply found it interesting that a Sanskrit word should pop into my brain while I was performing an eastern meditation. Not just pop into my head only to be forgotten, but pop into my head so forcefully and persistently that after forty years I still recall it. And not just any random word, but a word meaningful to eastern philosophy and religion, and though I didn’t know it at the time, meaningful to me.

 

<< Samsara is symbolized by the endless knot.

In Florida, Just Keep On Driving

I’ve blogged about Florida before. In this post I wrote about a central Florida man who was shot twice because he complained about the slow service in a pizza restaurant. I also wrote about a central Florida man who fatally shot his roommate during an argument over how to prepare pork chops.

Now, there’s been a shooting in a Tampa Bay area movie theater. A retired police captain shot the man sitting in front of him because the man wouldn’t stop texting. The man was killed – his wife was hit by the bullet and was injured. The movie had not begun when the shooting occurred.

If you have to drive through central Florida, I recommend that you do not stop your vehicle. Do not stop for pizza. Do not discuss with anyone how food should be prepared. Do not text anyone until you are well clear of the crazy zone.

And good luck.

Keeping Warm

In olden times, like when I was a kid, sometimes we would have what the old folks of that day called a “cold snap.” Now it’s modern times, so today we have a polar vortex. It’s the high tech, high priced version of the old cold snap.

We can still use a fireplace to stay warm. But as I type this, there is an impressive array of city fire-fighting equipment in front of the house next door to mine – big trucks with flashing red lights and brilliant white strobes. I see no fire, so I suspect that the residents of the house attempted to build a fire in the fireplace and either forgot to open the fireplace damper or were unaware they had to do so before building a fire.

In the spirit of public safety, I have placed the following video on this blog post. If you feel chilly, simply play the video full-screen by clicking the full-screen button at the bottom-right corner of the Player. This video will not fill your house with smoke – guaranteed.

Monday Morning 3 AM

I went to bed early Sunday night. I had watched the Wild Card Playoff games, which were mildly entertaining, although I didn’t have a favorite team in the games. After that there was nothing on TV I wanted to watch. Around 9 or 10 I called it a night.

As always, I awakened in darkness needing to pee, but getting out of bed was too much trouble. After mentally balancing the pressure in my bladder against my desire to stay in bed, to not drag myself upright, turn on the bedside lamp, and trudge to the bathroom, my laziness won out. I decided to remain in bed, hoping I would get back to sleep, even though in the back of my mind I knew the attempt would be futile. Once I awaken, I never get back to sleep. Eventually I decided enough is enough. I threw back the cover and got out of bed. I checked the clock: 3:30 AM. I trudged to the bathroom, finally, for my early morning micturation. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Sitting at my computer in my dark house, I check the outside temperature. It is 66°. That’s high for December, especially since the low tonight is supposed to be 8°. That’s 8° Fahrenheit, not Celsius. Tomorrow’s high will be 20° F. For a while I answered email and then began this blog post at 4:30 AM. (What else does one do at 4:30 AM?) As I write, it is pouring rain. A weather front is passing through town. No doubt, it is a cold front, chilling the air and condensing the moisture it holds. But the cold front must be far up in the sky. There is certainly no cold front down here on the ground. Not yet, anyway.

A friend signed onto Skype at 4:50 AM and we exchanged banalities for a while. Then we each began our usual morning news-reading, web-surfing, time-wasting activities. What else can one do at 4:50 AM?

It’s 7:15 AM – the day is beginning to lighten. I open the blinds so I can see outside. It’s still too dark for the world to illuminate my room. The screen of my LCD monitor casts a blue-tinted light into my surroundings. My cable modem blinks one red LED while green and blue LEDs on it are lit solid. What does that mean? My router shows several green LEDs and a blue LED, all lit solid. What does that mean? My magicjack alternately blinks red and green LEDs while a blue LED is lit solid. What does that mean?

I’m beginning to long for the day when our technological wonders can speak to us – the day when we will be able to converse with them.

“Good morning, cable modem. Good morning, router. How are we today?”

“Good morning, VirtualWayne. We’re fine. We’ll let you know if we have a problem we can’t fix on our own.”

“Thanks, guys.”

What do you think – five years? Ten? Because it’s going to happen. There are too many of us fiddling with our technology, too many of us who can’t set the clocks on our kitchen gadgets, for that technology to not be just around the corner. Even if, at first, they can’t converse with us, they’ll be sending us emails. And maybe even Skyping with us.

“Hey, TV, is there anything good on right now?”

“Nothing you’d like, VirtualWayne.”

“Ok, you know me best. I’ll take your word for it.”

“No problem, VirtualWayne.”

It’s 8:00 AM. My computer tells me the outside temperature has cooled to 55° since I arose. There’s nothing more to say. I’m going to click the Publish button now, and let my computer handle the business of getting all these words sent to the right place on the Internet. I don’t know how it works, except my computer talks to another computer somewhere in CyberSpace. As far as I can determine, the rest is magic.

Cold Weather Ahead

The talking heads on cable news have been going on and on about the approaching cold weather. You’d think it was the Apocalypse. It’s just winter, folks. Okay, it’s colder than usual, but winters do that on occasion. A couple of cold days doesn’t mean a new ice age is here. It’s what the weather people call an “arctic blast.” It’s caused by the jet stream dipping south, allowing cold air that Canadians should properly keep on their side of the border to spill over into the States.

Fortunately for me, I live in Virginia – not some place that gets really cold, like North Dakota. (Incidentally, according to the NWS the current temperature in my home town is 55° F (13° C) whereas the current temperature in Fargo, ND, is a not-so-balmy -15° F (-26° C). Still, Monday night through Wednesday night will be chilly as can be seen from this NWS forecast chart:

This weekend is the NFL Wild Card Playoff Weekend, and Sunday’s game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, may be the coldest NFL game ever played. So they say. The second half temperature is forecast to be -10° F. Adding wind chill, the feel-like temperature is expected to be -35° F.

I’d hate to work outdoors in that kind of weather, but if I did, knowing I was making a minimum wage of $375,000 would make it more bearable. For 2014, a new player will earn $420,000, plus signing bonus and incentives. Plus celebrity endorsements and advertising. The average NFL player’s salary in 2011 was $1.9 million. The best players earned over $20 million. Is there any question why they’re willing to work outside, even in bad weather?

I think not. I think the real question is why someone would pay lots of cash to be allowed to sit outside in brutally cold weather for hours to watch those guys play. Oh yeah – they’re fans. And as we know, “fan” is derived from the word fanatic.

New Year’s Day 2014

It’s the first day of 2014. I hope your NYE was fun. I fell asleep in front of the TV. I woke around 2 or 3 AM and went to bed.

This morning I went to the store to buy a salad and the requisite New Year’s black-eyed peas. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s day is a Southern tradition. The peas originated in West Africa, but now they’re cultivated around the world. While at the store I impulsively bought a Bell pepper and a sweet onion. Then I thought, what can I add to these vegetables to make a meal? Why, ground beef and puréed tomato. Then I thought, that’s basically the ingredients for stuffed pepper. I don’t want stuffed pepper. And so, as the forecast is calling for rain and snow tomorrow, I decided to make chili con carne with beans, or as I call it, chili. I winged the recipe – I change it every time I make it.

If you’re interested, here’s the recipe for my latest chili experiment. If you’re not interested, skip ahead.

1 pound ground beef (92% lean)
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium sweet pepper, diced
1 15 oz can of each:
    dark red kidney beans
    pinto beans
    diced tomato with jalapeño, cumin, red pepper
    diced tomato with ground red pepper, dried chili pepper, cumin
1 tsp ground chili pepper
1/4 tsp cinnamon-sugar mix

Brown the ground beef and add the other ingredients. Stir. Bring to a simmer. Cook until the onion is cooked and no longer white. Serve in a bowl and garnish with shredded cheese and a spoonful of light sour cream.

This chili has a little heat but it’s not nearly as hot as my usual chili. If you like your chili spicier, use a Tbsp of chili pepper and maybe 1/4 tsp of black pepper. You can also buy canned diced tomato with green chilies. They’re fairly zingy. Or you can add diced jalapeño or serrano pepper. I added no cumin because both cans of tomato had cumin in them.

Next I decided to drive to a nearby gas station to purchase 5 gallons of K-1 kerosene to run my little stove for the next couple of days. But an Indian lady who works there said their kerosene pump was broken, and I didn’t know of another gas station that sells K-1. I drove up the road to a large WaWa, but they didn’t have a K-1 pump. It seems fewer and fewer gas stations sell K-1. 

Leaving the gas station, I noticed that my Vehicle Information Center (VIC) was alerting me that the driver’s door was ajar. Except, the door was closed. The VIC beeped a few times and flashed a red, open door symbol on a little screen mounted between the dashboard and the driveshaft hump. The VIC uses a jamb-mounted switch to detect an open door. I tinkered with the switch, pushing the button in and out several times to see if it was just a matter of a dirty contact, but the door-ajar warning continued flashing. Oy. A trip to the shop seems to be in my near future.

It’s getting dark – time to close the blinds and turn on some lights. I hope you have a happy and prosperous 2014.