"if you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room"

Sunday, December 1, 2013

gonna be busy!

With Thanksgiving over the big Christmas buying frenzy starts. I have to laugh a little at the whole "Black Friday" thing. Since when did Friday begin at 4pm on Thursday? Looks like all the stores are doing their best to get people in earlier and earlier for the mayhem.
We were invited to go to dinner Thursday afternoon with a group of fellow "Amazonians" here in our RV park. To give us time to enjoy the holiday Amazon let the day shift off three hours early and delayed our start time by three hours, thanks Amazon! :-) There were five couples and we had a great time getting to know each other and share our stories.

Friday and Saturday were our regular scheduled work days and it was also an "all hands on deck" event. Pretty much everyone who works at Amazon had to work those days. We were busy but with all the extra people from different shifts we handled the additional work load well. The biggest issue was getting in and out of the parking lot! Even though the police were directing traffic it was still a slow process moving that many people in and out.

Today (Sunday) is our only day off for a few days. We are normally off Sunday, Monday and Tuesday but with "Cyber Monday" coming up we are having to work. We will get Wednesday off and then back to work the rest of the week. We are both still a little sore after work but my hands have quit hurting and my feet are starting to "get used to the abuse". :-)

While off today I took advantage of the time to complete my next project. Several months ago I read on an internet forum about changing the fluorescent lights in the ceiling into LED lights by simply wiring in a strip of lights. I kind of forgot about it until our friend and fellow fulltimer Steve (FOSJ Blog) wrote that he had made the switch in their motorhome. This sparked the memory in me and I got busy ordering the LED lights and electrical connectors which were delivered last week. The lights are pretty easy to install, they come in a big strip and you can cut them with scissors to the length you want. I removed the florescent bulbs and cut the wires to the ballast. Then you simply wire the LED's up and peel and stick to the inside of the light fixture. The lights work great but I had some issues with a couple of the "quick connects" that came with them, they just didn't want to make a good connections. I changed out all three of our overhead lights and we really like the new lights.
Before


After


I still have one connector that is giving me a problem. I think I'll get my soldering iron out, maybe that will scare it into working right! :-)

We also decided to get into the Christmas spirit so we put up our tree! That consisted of me crawling into one of our basement storage compartments trying to find the box holding our tree which, of course, was all the way back into the farthest corner. Turns out that was the hardest part since the lights are already strung on the limbs all you have to do is spread them out and hang the ornaments.


Looks pretty festive! :-)

I'm not sure if I'll feel much like writing in the next week or so since we will be working so much. Only three more weeks to go and we'll be free again! I'll keep you posted.

2 comments:

  1. Good job on the lights! We're really happy with ours. Glad to hear everything is moving right along at Amazon. You guys are doing great.

    We leave for home a week from Tuesday. Can't wait. Maybe we'll catch up with you guys on our way out of Florida.

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  2. I placed my Amazon order last night. Could you please see that I get it quickly?

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