Today was the final day of the season for Learned League. In some ways, it’s been my best season since I joined back in 2016 – I got 78% of the questions right versus my lifetime 68.9% and there were 7 days out of 25 where I got all 6 questions right. On the other hand, I wound up with a tie on 5 of those 7 days, which was frustrating, and ended up with 10 ties (a personal record).

Oh, well, there’s always next season!

The birds have started returning to the creek near us – ducks are there almost every time we walk by, and yesterday, there was a beautiful egret. It wasn’t there today, though, but I hope to see it again soon.

The Insteon outdoor on/off outlet I mentioned on Monday arrived this afternoon, and I wasted no time in adding it to Indigo and Alexa so I can control it easily.

I had hoped to put the outlet inside the box containing the landscape lighting equipment, replacing the mechanical timer, but the only way to get it in there needed me to contort the 110-volt supply cable in ways that made me uneasy, so I gave up and mounted the outlet on top of the box. “Mounted” is a somewhat generous description, but I think it’s sufficiently stable to get by.

And now I can say, “Alexa, turn on garden” and the lights come on; they also come on automatically around sunset and turn off at 10:30pm.