It was a day to attend to a number of little things around the compound. I won’t say “finishing touches” because, right now, too many things seem too far from “finishing.”
The studio door has a hasp on the outside with a padlock. It has a doorknob, but there’s no latch on the knob. It just relies on the door fitting tightly in the frame to stay closed. Since we’re starting to have friends and family visiting, I thought it best to be able to securely latch the door from the inside, so I installed a bolt latch.
While I was dealing with bolt latches, I enlarged the receiver hole on the outdoor shower. The door had sagged a bit since the last time I re-aligned the bolt with the receiver, and it was hard to close.
I also ordered some bamboo shades for the outdoor shower. The shower seems private to us, but I did put the pavilion right in front of the shower so when we have shy family members visiting they can close the shades if they feel too exposed to the pavilion.
I’ve also been bothered by the fact that the temperature probe on the hot tub was several degrees off from what the tub itself reported. When I’ve used a kitchen thermometer, it usually agrees with the tub and not the probe. There’s no straightforward way to calibrate the probes. I was thinking of all kind of exotic ways to re-calibrate the probe when I realized they’re only about $14 and the easiest thing would be to just get another one. I did, and it’s much better. I can take the one that reads to high and use it to, say, monitor the temperature inside the generator house where it isn’t critical that it hue to some standard.
Speaking of the generator house, the generator still likes to shut down without apparent cause. I’m convinced there’s still a little leak in the exhaust, so I took another stab at re-aligning and tightening it. Ultimately, I’m going to have to seal it with silicone, but I can’t do that until we can let it cure for at least 72 hours. We’ve been having storms, so I haven’t wanted us to commit to having the generator offline for that long.
Oh, storms. Judging from the emails and texts I’ve been getting, our storms must be getting some attention in the national news. The storms have been pretty bad in the islands, and even on our island, but for the most part they haven’t impacted us. We’ve received over eight inches of rainfall, but this is a tropical forest and that isn’t actually enough to give us problems.
We’re on the big island, shown on the bottom right. For the most part, the heavy weather is currently bypassing us. Thanks, everyone, for your concern.
Once it appears as though there are no storm systems within striking distance, I’ll make a definitive fix to the generator exhaust.
—2p