Fan

I felt a little useless this past week at the cottage. While the gents were whacking, smashing, swearing, and requesting bandaids, I found idle time to read three novels, putter a bit in the gardens, and even have the odd afternoon nap. It was really... really... weird. Nice, but weird.

I began to feel awful about getting nothing accomplished (How sad is it that I felt guilty for relaxing at the cottage? ), so I decided to install the new ceiling fan we picked up for the guest bedroom.

You may (or may not) know that I'm a mild-mannered* technical writer by day.

Reading badly written installation instructions incenses me. Steam spews from my ears. Profanities spill from my mouth. My left hand twitches in search of a red pen. When I get instructions like "Loosen jam screws on downrod" and neither "jam screws" or "downrod" are labelled in the handy-dandy parts diagram, I contemplate marking up their instructions with corrections and sending them back to the manufacturer. Then I wonder if there's a business model in that: marking up parts of their instructions, and sending them back a page or two holding the rest for ransom. If they want to pay for my editing services, I'll send them the rest of the cleaned up manual. I could make a killing!

This is what happens when I have too many naps. My brain isn't tired enough to dismiss this sort of nonsense post-haste.

Once the jam screws and downrod were identified and, as appropriate, loosened, and once I essentially gave up on the instructions and figured the rest out in spite of them, the fan was installed (with murettes and properly affixed ground wires, thankyouverymuch). I have no photos of the actual installation because I am the photographer, and the photographer's hands happened to be full of fan at the time.

As evidenced in this photo, the installation was a success! The fan goes, the light turns on.

Are ceiling fans pretty? Heck. No. But they're a godsend when it's stinky hot out and you have no AC.

Oh, and if you're wondering why it looks like the fan is pulling out of the ceiling, it's because the numbnuts that installed the ceiling (strapping/tiles) left almost no clearance for the octagon box, so it isn't sitting flush with the ceiling tiles. It's securely anchored in the ceiling (dad hung off it just to be sure), but it sticks out a bit. Consequently the fan canopy is flush with the octagon box, but not the ceiling. Stupid.

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*no, not really. Mild-mannered, that is.