#Honey

Even though I am a retired Electrician, emphasis on ‘Retired’, people sometimes call me for a job. Unless it is a friend, I tell them that I’m retired and not doing any more jobs.

This morning I did a job for an old friend. He bought a new digital thermostat for his furnace and he wanted me to replace his old one. It was one of those with the mercury bulb and the spring that expands or contracts to control the temperature. His wife wanted one with large numbers and one that also was more accurate.

So I went yesterday morning to do this little job. When I was still in the workforce, I installed plenty of those digital thermostats. They can be programmed for every day of the week to raise the temperature in the morning and lower it again for the night. Everything is automatic. I have one of those in my own house.

They are easy to connect, but not so easy to program, unless one has done a slew of them and, ideally, they all are the same. The problem is they are not all the same. Every manufacturer has its own design. Different look, different way of programming. Before you install one you have to spend time to study the instruction booklet. This thermostat had only 3 buttons and the programming was done by pushing them in different order, and it was all done on the screen.

It took me an hour to figure out the damn thing. Most of it by trial and error. Who can understand those EASY instructions? Maybe a ten-year-old kid but not an adult. If they only had added one line: Don’t push the button ‘Done’ before you have finished all 10 steps to get everything set up. It may have saved me some time. I finally realized what needed to be done after pushing every button (all three of them) in different sequences. Once you know what to do it is easy and it seems so logical.

Perhaps one of the problems was that I am not doing this kind of work anymore and haven’t kept up with new products. Well, I managed to get it all working.

I don’t charge friends for this. I do it as a favor and for old time’s sake. My friend is a beekeeper. Retired now also from keeping bees, but he still gets honey from the guy who took over from him. More than he can use himself. I’ve done plenty of work for him for the last 30 years. He always needed some work done in his honey house; in fact, I wired it for him when he built it. Over the years he kept adding to it. I built special heaters with thermostats for him to keep his bees alive over the winter, helped him design gadgets for his experiments and things like that. It was interesting. He is a handy guy and built everything himself, but he needed advice when it came to the electrical stuff.

He never paid me any money, ( I didn’t ask for any), instead he gave me honey. I always got paid well for my work – in honey. And that was okay, because I eat it every day. He made excellent, award-winning honey. One wall in his bee house is plastered with awards, mostly first and second prizes he won at competitions. In his productive years he entered competitions in Toronto where he competed against beekeepers from all over the world, and he won many first prizes.

Honey is a wonderful product for many ailments. Mixed with cider vinegar it helps to ease the pain of arthritis and gout. It has many healing properties, is useful as an antiseptic. You can put it on wounds to keep them clean. It helps with stomach problems, strengthens the immunity system, etc. It is almost like a wonder drug. And it tastes great. A wonderful substitute for sugar which is not healthy.

Anyway, I got another pail full of honey (about 10 pounds). We put it into small margarine containers and freeze it. That’s right. We freeze it. It keeps fresh in the freezer and lasts forever. When we need it, we let it thaw, then we heat it up in a pot to return it to its liquid state. NEVER put it into the Micro wave oven. It destroys all the good stuff.

Honey does not go bad. They found honey from early Egypt and it is still edible. So the next time you dig up a mummy don't throw away that urn with the honey.