Caminito #1: Bloomfield to Newark/Harrison along the Lenape Trail

 A lovely May Thursday. I'd be mad not to use it! So I get the backpack on and take off! Finally doing the Lenape Trail!

Clark's Pond, Bloomfield.

Yanticaw Park/Booth Park, Nutley.

Belleville Park, Belleville

Path washed away by recent storms, just above Branch Brook Park Drive, Newark

Footbridge over Branch Brook Park Drive, Newark.

Of course it's safe!

Branch Brook Park, Newark.

Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Newark.

Branch Brook Lake, Newark.

Essex County Hall of Records, Newark. Hmm . . . what are those big letters on the street?

St. James African Methodist Church, Newark.

Streets of Newark.

Campus Town, Newark.

War Memorial, Military Park, Newark.

Newark Downtown over the Passaic River.

Southward view along restored riverfront walk, Newark.

They didn't knock the Ballantine House down!

Old Presbyterian church now converted to an "Innovation Cathedral" by Audible. Next door Rutgers Business school and dorm building.

The first third of my Lenape Trail caminito finished. What a wonderful walk! Newark really surprised me at the end, and I must return there for more exploring!

Caminito #2 on the Lenape Trail: Bloomfield - Verona

Bloomfield to Verona on the Lenape Trail.

14 miles, which took me six hours with several breaks.

Ready for Walking!

 

 

Clark's Pond, Bloomfield

 

  Archery Field, Brookdale Park

 

Mills Reservation

 

 Mills Reservation

 

 Newark Reservoir

 

West Essex Trail.

The trail is a converted railway line. Hence "JC 18" - Jersey City 18 miles.

 

From the converted railway bridge over Highway 23.

 

Cedar Beans - an absolutely fantastic coffee shop 100 yards from the railway bridge. Go down the steps on the western side of the bridge, walk south for 100 yards and use the crosswalk (lights flash when you press a button). DO NOT TRY TO CROSS 23 ANY OTHER WAY (traffic is fast and dangerous).

 

Atmosphere in the coffee shop.

 

Dave and Christina in the Coffee Shop. Christina made me a mean latté! Cedar Beans, Pompton Avenue, Cedar Grove. @cedarbeanscoffeejoint

 

Hilltop Reservation.

 

Hilltop Reservation

 

Hilltop Reservation

 

Hilltop Reservation

Caught the bus back home from Verona. Alas, a terribly sub-par experience with NJ Transit's 29 bus, which runs the length of Bloomfield Avenue. Surly drivers, buses way off schedule, and half of the buses untrackable because their GPS transponders were off.

The only good news is that the 29 is frequent. Don't bother using the NJ Transit app or any other transit app, as many of the buses don't show up. You'll simply have to wait at a bus stop and throw yourself in front of the first 29 bus that comes along. The first one that showed up never even stopped for me.

Altogether a great day. We'll brush the bus thing under the carpet.

Very Disappointed with the Australian Drama "Glitch"

 There's an excellent review of this series from the Guardian, and it says some of what I'm going to say, but I think it's too kind.

One of these days we're going to find out that scriptwriters play some sort of forfeits game with each other. Scriptwriter 1 texts Scriptwriter 2 and says "This week you must write an alien, a racist, and a murder into your script" (or forfeit a bottle of Laphroaig). And Scriptwriter 2 must go ahead and do so.

This is what Glitch feels like. It's as if you've been thrown a strange mystery which, rather than resolving, just becomes ever more ridiculous until you realize you've been hoodwinked. The writers never knew the solution, and they're just going to keep on until you realize this yourself.

The premise itself is excellent: seven people inexplicably crawl out of their graves in a rural Australian town. They're in the best of health, but they have no idea what has brought them back. Gradually it becomes clear that the town's public health doctor is somehow connected to the mysterious resurrection, as is the secretive pharmaceuticals factory that seems to employ much of the town's population.

In any sane scenario, the scriptwriters would know what underlies the mysterious events and would explain them all by the end of the series. But in this series, they clearly have no idea why things are happening, and thus they continue to spin the plates (and add several more) in every episode, hoping that the actors and the cliffhangers will distract us.

It took me fully until the end of series 2 to realize that they were just stringing us along. There's an invisible border around the town that ensures the resurrected cannot leave, but it's never explained how or why it works (and how it's so precise). John/William, a resurrected deserter from the British navy in the nineteenth century, is given a strange dog whistle that summons memories in the resurrected, but we are never told how or why. Dr. Elishia McKellar, the public health doctor, who may have a history with the deserter, transpires to be one of the resurrected herself, but is able to travel in and out of the town without difficulty. Phil Holden, a local part-Aboriginal(?) layabout, dies at sea many hundreds of miles away, and returns to the town transformed. Now armed with a magical ability to talk to the dead and resurrected (even in their sleep), he joins forces with Sarah Hayes, the wife of the local police sergeant, to kill all of the resurrected. He doesn't know why he's doing this, and neither does Sarah.

And James Hayes, that poor police sergeant. He's possibly the worst policeman in Australia. As the bodycount rises, he announces again and again that they can't possibly call in "the feds". By the time season two has finished, he's killed, maimed, arrested or detained half the cast at some stage or another. His continuing mission is to tell people to "stay there" while he investigates the next atrocity, only to return and find them gone.

As the show, which was filmed in Castlemaine, progresses, we're given tiny little hints here and there that may or may not be relevant. Elishia appears to have been in love with the deserter - did this mass resurrection happen by accident, as she tried to revive him? If so, we're left in the dark as to why she was happily living as a lesbian in Melbourne before moving to the town. Patrick Fitzgerald, the potty-mouthed Irish-born ex-mayor of the town, murdered by his son a century and a half earlier, wants the law to recognize that his manor house (now up for sale) should go to the descendants of his Aboriginal mistress, and only obliquely do we see (I think) that the buyer of the manor house is Noregard, the pharmaceuticals company that seems to run the town from the shadows.

Ah, yes. Yoorana. The town. It's supposed to be a one-horse town in the outback, but it's big enough to have trains coming through at all times of the night. There are pleasant outdoor cafés. There are wide streets, and a high school to which Beau, Paddy's new sidekick, goes. There's a nicely manicured public park where you can walk your baby. So where is everybody? There's the eerie sense in this story that a neutron bomb has gone off and killed everybody but the cast.

 What do I think about watching the third series? I couldn't give a Castlemaine XXXX.

Replacing a WellTec 3-speed pull switch on a Hampton Bay Ceiling Fan with a Generic Zing Ear Switch

 It's common to pull the chain right out of the switch in a Hampton Bay ceiling fan. Alas, fixing it isn't easy. Nothing is easy with cheap electronics. You will probably have to replace the whole switch, and that means wiring. It also means working with non-standard wire colors, so take lots of pictures.

You'll probably need to work in strong daylight, as you must cut off electricity to the unit before you proceed (so no access to artificial light).

I made the stupid error of not photogaphing EVERYTHING, and paid the price. I'll say it again: photograph EVERYTHING!!

Take out the bulbs.

Take off the bulb shades. Use this opportunity to give them a wash.

Unscrew the cover in the center of the unit (three shortish screws on the side of the barrel) and carefully let the light fixture hang (the light fixture might fall out, and if so, ensure that no wires become disconnected. Don't unscrew the screws next to the switch. Be especially careful about the black and yellow wires, which connect with slim, easily disconnected, plugs to the unit's blue and white wires):

Now, disentangle the mess of wires, making sure not to disconnect anything. Take pictures as you go along. This mess is all going back into that small space.

You know what you're replacing: it's the little ear-shaped switch that fits through the hole in the side of the housing. Unscrew the outside retainer and very carefully get the switch to a position of visibility and accessibility. Take a picture of your switch, front and back. It should look a bit like this:

If you've pulled the chain right out, here's where you note the model number of the chain pull switch and go buy a replacement. You'll probably have to get it online, but your local store may have something. If not, you'll be waiting until it arrives in the post. Save and label everything in a shoebox. Don't let your teenager touch anything!

Take careful note of your wiring. Mine was:

L    Purple

3    Grey

2    Black

1    Brown

This is highly non-standard wiring. L is usually black. But not in this case.

If the gods are smiling, you will get an exact replacement of the switch, and you'll simply have to rewire it the same way. If the gods are displeased, you will get a weird knock-off switch, which I got. Something from the Zing Ear company. For some inexplicable reason the switch goes L-2-3-1. I haven't been able to get a straight answer on what the numbers mean for Zing Ear, so that means, even after you've attached the purple wire to L, that there are nine possible wiring combinations with the other three wires.

That really sucks. Because for each test you have to wire the unit while probably standing on a chair, go to the fuseboard and turn the circuit on, return to the ceiling fan, turn it on and then test the four switch positions without pulling the wires out of their slots. Which is REALLY DIFFICULT. Particularly if it's 90 degrees, because that's why you need the fan in the first place.

Wiring these switches is easy, but a bloody pain. The chain pulls under tension from a spring, and the thing will jump apart when you open it!). You just slide the wires into the slots from outside and they should stay put. If the wires are too soft to slide in (several of mine were), slide a paper clip in first, then the wire, and then pull the paper clip back out.

I'm probably going to blow the damn thing up, but honestly, after four tests with wires falling out of slots and several runs to and from the fuseboard, I found one wiring configuration that put the fan on high, and that was enough for me. So no medium or low settings on the fan anymore.

Zing Ear provide wiring instructions for their units, but none matched the configuration that I had (with L=purple). I tried mapping the old switch's configuration onto their weirdly misnumbered unit, but it wouldn't work. It's worth looking at the discussion here, which suggests that these switches have very idiosyncratic internal layouts and aren't really possible to replace. 

Screwing the switch back in and forcing the rats' nest of wires back into the housing is your next challenge. If you can do that and reattach the cover, then congratulations - your ceiling fan works again (kind of).

Moral: these things aren't designed for repair. You're probably better off just buying a new fan.