The four of us started off the day with a breakfast of oatmeal with blueberries and discussion of today’s plan. This is the last day that Cyndy and Michael will be here with us and they planned to just relax and enjoy the day. The weather wasn’t very good so Patty and I decided to focus on some indoor tasks.
Cleaning the lens.
Through the week, working on mostly sunny days, Cyndy was only able to clean the lighthouse lens for an hour or so at a time before it got too hot to be bearable. She’d take a break to cool off and do something else and then return to the job for another stretch until it got too hot again. By today, she had finished cleaning each of the individual pieces (258 in total) that she could reach. I was volunteered to finish the cleaning because I can reach the highest as the tallest one here. Still, even with a step stool, I could not reach the very top three rows of individual lenses. The ones at the top are almost vertical and become progressively more horizontal top to bottom. The ones at the top were not very dirty so that skipping them wasn’t really noticeable.
It took me all morning and about half of the afternoon to to finish cleaning the top four feet or so of lens but when I was finished, I could really tell the difference. Occasionally, the sun would peek through the clouds and the cleaned lens shined brilliant prisms on the inside of the glass tower windows and walls.
Cyndy & Michael playing Scrabble at the picnic table off the kitchen.
While I was up in the tower, Patty thoroughly cleaned the museum and at the suggestion of Bev, a former Seguin keeper, made a stanchion rope type thing out of rope and a salvaged buoy to keep folks from going behind the gift shop counter. Afterwards, she continued working on some of the trail signs that needed painting and repair. She re-stenciled the Lighthouse Trail sign and took care of some others with broken stakes. We also fixed the weather station (it was showing crazy rainfall rates) when we saw that the rain bucket attachment was not attached correctly. The kitchen screen door had a broken spring that we replaced and also added a couple of stop blocks to the door jamb to prevent it from closing too far and getting stuck which had been happening all week.
When our workday ended, I helped Patty make a dinner of fish tacos with a side of homemade coleslaw.
It was a foggy evening, just like it had been most of the day which meant no sunset but it also gave us the first view of the “umbrella” effect that the light creates when it reflects off the moisture of the fog.
I wrote this blog post in real-time but it will be a few days late showing up on the website because we ran out of data on our plan. We’re using an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot for our Internet access and it didn’t occur to either of us that we’d need to make some changes to our laptop settings to avoid exactly what happened. Lesson learned! Between automatic Windows updates, an active OneDrive account, and all the other background activity using bandwidth plus lost of posting of pictures and videos to the blog and FaceBook, our monthly allotment was used up in less than a week. We’re going to increase our monthly data allotment but will also change a little about how we post. The daily blog posts will be our priority but we’ll probably also use a couple of thumb drives to pass pictures and videos off to Julie (the FOSILS person in charge of social media) to post when we see her each Wednesday.
Tomorrow we’ll see Cyndy and Michael off and be left on our own to run things. We’ve learned lots about the quirks of living here and feel confident that we’ll be fine and know that Cyndy’s just a phone call away if we need anything.
It was a foggy evening, just like it had been most of the day which meant no sunset but it also gave us the first view of the “umbrella” effect that the light creates when it reflects off the moisture of the fog.
I wrote this blog post in real-time but it will be a few days late showing up on the website because we ran out of data on our plan. We’re using an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot for our Internet access and it didn’t occur to either of us that we’d need to make some changes to our laptop settings to avoid exactly what happened. Lesson learned! Between automatic Windows updates, an active OneDrive account, and all the other background activity using bandwidth plus lost of posting of pictures and videos to the blog and FaceBook, our monthly allotment was used up in less than a week. We’re going to increase our monthly data allotment but will also change a little about how we post. The daily blog posts will be our priority but we’ll probably also use a couple of thumb drives to pass pictures and videos off to Julie (the FOSILS person in charge of social media) to post when we see her each Wednesday.
Tomorrow we’ll see Cyndy and Michael off and be left on our own to run things. We’ve learned lots about the quirks of living here and feel confident that we’ll be fine and know that Cyndy’s just a phone call away if we need anything.
