Spent the last few days doing wiring and helping out around the house. Updated some of those activities in the last edition but yesterday got the 120V wiring all closed up and powered. Everything in the back porch has power and works so all the extension cords got cleaned up and put away. I still have to hook up the 240V but am planning on shutting off power to the house before I do that. I'm not a total idiot. 😁
So Abilene Kansas 4th. A patriotic but small town. Abilene is located in Dickinson county. The total population of the county is under 20,000. I live in a town smaller than Abilene, with only about 5,000 resident, compared to Abilene's 9,000, but the difference is that my town is one of the smallest in my county, whereas Abilene is the largest town in this county. It is amazingly sparsely populated. The 4th of July celebrations were commensurately smaller when compared with home. So what were the positives and negatives?
My town has a parade, a car show, vendors, and fireworks. People come from all over the county and Canada to attend. Hard to estimate how many show up but there are usually five to six blocks of classic cars and three to four blocks of vendors.
Abilene, on the other hand, had none of that except the fireworks. There were other activities going on down in Eisenhower Park yesterday though. Mud volleyball, turtle races, cornhole tournament, etc. I drove by during the day just to check it out but the festivities were dampened by the monstrous rainstorm that hammered through right around 11 am. I don't know what attendance would have looked like had the forecast not been so bad but there were very few people in the park.
In the evening, however, with the weather cleared and the air cool, there was a concert at the bandstand. The Abilene Municipal Band, which has been around for 144 years, played an hour's worth of marches and patriotic music. One number was the Lexington March, although I'm not sure if it was the Edmundson or the King version. They invited all the kids in the audience to come up and march through the audience waving flags while they played. I've included a short video here:
Afterwards we moved a block or so to the fields behind the community center for a spectacular fireworks show. We were there a half hour or so and fireworks were going off all around during the whole wait time. Some people had set up in the same field and entertained us for that whole half an hour before the actual show. The show itself was outstanding. I won't bore you with pictures of fireworks. They looked like everyone else's firework pictures. All in all it was very enjoyable. It was great to see so many people thankful for America. There were no politics whatsoever, just Americans celebrating the greatest country in the history of the world.
2 comments:
But does the house have AC?
At this point it has neither central heat nor AC as the big unit went bad before they bought the place. My cousin and I have been discussing the issue because she isn't here during the winter and didn't think it really mattered. I pointed out the negative effects on the structure by not being heated to some extent so not sure what she's going to do in the short run. Perhaps an electric heater set to just keep enough heat in the house to mitigate the freezing.
The AC is, right now, some window units. There are four in the house and I have kept the two upstairs units running, although I'm bumping up the temperature during the day when I'm not here much. At night I turn it down so that I can sleep better. (I'm the only person using the upstairs at this time). It's a fairly small house, four bedrooms, three up and one down, and seems to be pretty well insulated. There are ceiling fans in the LR, the kitchen, and the back porch and they circulate the air enough that it has been comfortable, even without the downstairs AC units on.
There also used to be a big exhaust fan in the back upstairs bedroom that was controlled by a switch in the pantry directly below it. West side of the house. I think the idea was to pull air through the whole house by exhausting at the end opposite the stairs and pulling from the windows in the kitchen. They took the big fan out but the wiring is still there. I might have just replaced the fan with something less industrial looking, or maybe put a powered exhaust vent right above that window, but it's not my house so not my choice. I may discuss that with her but otoh once there's central heat and air again, maybe it's unnecessary.
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