and things went downhill from there

My stint as a contractor came to an end on the 31st of July this year. To be more accurate, it was supposed to end on that day, but somebody in IT accidentally rescinded my system access at the end of day on the 30th, so I showed up for work on the 31st and found out that I was locked out of everything. I walked over to the office of the Deskside Support guys over on the other building and told them to come collect my laptop, then handed my pass card to the receptionist and went home.

I billed them for an hour, so it was a pretty easy hundred bucks for me, but I'd have liked to say goodbye to the rest of my group over Teams.

Anyway, on to "the thing" that I did.

Now that I'm re-retired, I have been trying to make better use of my time than I did during the previous iteration of my retirement. At atara's prompting, I am giving myself at least one thing to accomplish every day.

We have some bottle lights that we bought from the front yard about ten years ago. We got them from a place called Jysk - which is a Danish chain that we liken to being a bargain-basement Ikea. They hang from the trees out front by strings, and other than having to replace those every couple of years, they've otherwise been reliable. Until this year.

When we put them out this spring, only one of them lit. And it was only working sporadically, flickering and blinking in the dark.

Somewhere in the shapeless morass of trivia I've managed to cram into my brain over the years is the knowledge that when a solar-powered garden light fails, the most likely cause is the power switch, followed by the battery. I suspected that this was the case with our bottle lights, so I picked up a remarkably cheap, 40-watt soldering iron last weekend. (Seriously, this thing was $7.95, so I'm not expecting a lifetime of service from it.) On Tuesday, I pulled down all of the bottle lights, disassembled them, and bridged the contacts for the on/of switches.

When I had them apart, I discovered why one of the had been blinking. The bottles are suppsoed to have corks to keep the rain out of them, but this one had lost its cork, and the bottom of the bottle had filled with water. As it swayed in the wind, the rust-filled water would complete the connection on the power switch and it would briefly light. Fortunately, I'd saved the base from a bottle that had broken earlier, because the circuit board in this one was badly corroded. I threw away the bad one and replaced it with the spare. I also sealed the top of the bottle to prevent more water from getting in.

That evening, three of the eight bottles lit. Barely. They had a wan glow that told of batteries that were on their last legs. The lights use standard AAA NiMH batteries, so I knew that they could be easily replaced.

But... when I shopped around online for replacements, I discovered that rechargeable NiMH batteries are not cheap. I mean, they don't cost a fortune either, but they cost more than I wanted to spend on these cheap lights. I finally broke my "no Amazon" rule and ordered a 24-pack of the cheapest ones I could find. They arrived today, and I swapped out all of the batteries this afternoon. As I swapped them, I took each bottle into garage to make sure it was working.

100% success. Our front yard should look much more merry and whimsical after sundown tonight.