You Know What's Annoying?

Light bulbs. Light bulbs are annoying, and I have spent this entire weekend proving it.

It used to be pretty easy. You'd go to the store to buy a light bulb and the only thing you really had to worry about was the wattage. No longer. Now you've got Edisons, incandescents, fluorescents, compact fluorescents, LEDs, and probably a dozen more I'm not remembering. Moreover, the standard comparator -- wattage -- now means nothing, a seven watt LED putting out as much light as a forty watt incandescent. 

And, of course, you've now got to choose between cool light and warm light, day light and soft light, plain light and "sparkly" light, and every other sort of "light" a marketer can come up with.

I just want a freakin' light bulb that will work in my lamp and light my room. But it's never that simple. 

The ceiling light in my living room gave up completely a little bit ago, and had to be replaced. There were three "features" of this lamp: it was about eighteen inches across, it clearly cost about ten bucks at Home Depot, and it used halogen bulbs. So, naturally, when it took it down, a good portion of the plaster underneath it came down too, having been baked by the halogen bulbs for so long that it no longer adhered to the lathe beneath it. 

Can I just say that there is no better job than drywalling a ceiling. (Yes, that was sarcasm.) 

And in the midst of repairing the ceiling and installing a new -- non-halogen -- lamp, the lamp in my entry went out as well. This one I'd put in. And like most things I do when working on a house built a hundred years ago, it was a kludged together Rube Goldberg thing involving an unswitched power line without an electrical box, a bulb fixture, a wireless motion sensor and lamp adapter, a ceiling fan cover and a reproduction lamp that isn't UL approved and is limited to a 40 watt bulb. 

Where in that ridiculous chain I lost power was anybody's guess. I'll spare the long involved story that had me standing on the post holding up the hand rail for the stairs and just say it turned out to be a combination of the lamp and bulb(s). Seems my reproduction lamp doesn't really like new technologies. Specifically, between the lamp and the motion sensor enough electricity leaks through when the lamp is "off" to keep the LED bulb generating light, but not enough electricity when it's "on" to fully power the LED causing it to flicker. 

But after four different bulbs, the lamp at least appears to be working again. 

All of which has nothing to do with cancer, except that dealing with cancer has pretty much consumed the entirety of my patience and tolerance and having to deal with this level of annoyance from a bloody light bulb was enough to send me back to bed with a pillow over my head.