So a few weeks ago, you might recall, a light bulb in the ceiling fixture in the dining room LITERALLY EXPLODED. With a loud boom. Shards of glass everywhere. It was a big mess.
Okay, that was weird, I thought.
So yesterday, the light bulb in the upstairs bathroom light LITERALLY EXPLODED. Fortunately, that light is housed in a hideous plastic cover, so the broken glass was contained and easy to clean up.
Okay: one was weird; two is alarming.
I wrote my brother, who is a lighting engineer, and asked, Should light bulbs LITERALLY EXPLODE? He said, NO! They should not!
I called the electricians, who had (coincidentally or not) been by not long before this started, repairing a switch at the back door so I can have a lovely new back porch light (which I keep meaning to take a picture of and show you). They said, No, they should not explode, but it was nothing we did; you probably got a bad batch of light bulbs. Let us know if it happens again.
So today… (you can see where this is going)… one of the little lights on the ventahood over my stove LITERALLY EXPLODED. Entirely different kind of bulb; entirely different kind of fixture.
Of course it was a few minutes after 5pm. I called the electricians at once; got their answering service; the electrician called me back about 6:30; he said, Okay, that is not right. You need to call the electric company, they are there 24 hours and will send someone out for free. And be sure to tell them about the EXPLODING.
(I am thinking: I am going to call the electric company and somehow NOT mention the EXPLODING?)
So, I call the electric company, and explain about the EXPLODING. They say, We will send someone out anon!
Within the hour, a very tall man with a ladder and a truck which he does not even turn off shows up. He does not want to see the three different places where the light bulbs have EXPLODED; he puts the ladder against the side of the house; turns off all my electricity; and I have barely gotten settled on the porch with my glass of wine (because it is now dark in the house, and nothing works) when he says, “I think I see what the problem is.”
Long story short (because I don’t understand electricity, even worse than the rest of you, because where I grew up there were only kerosene lanterns and wood cook stoves, and at night it was just dark, basically, and I am still to this day thrilled that I live in a world where there are switches on the wall and I can flip them and the light just COMES ON), there are four clips in the electric meter and one of them is not like the others and he maybe-jury-rigged it with a screwdriver and WD-40 but I should have the electricians come back and replace it soon. But probably things won’t go asplodey for the next little while, so I can deal with this when I get back from Seattle, because of course I am leaving tomorrow, because naturally things only start EXPLODING in one’s house when one is about to leave town.
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Other than that (Mrs. Edison), it was a very nice day. Miss H. and I went to lunch at a new place in the neighborhood, and then to the nursery, and it was OH MY GOD SUNNY AND WARM–
–and even though the nursery didn’t have much, we each still got a few things, and I had a marvelous time planting them IN THE SUN when I got home. IN TANK TOP AND SANDALS. Ahem.
And I got up to page 15 on the collab story, but (alas) didn’t finish it, as I’d hoped to; did freelance work; watered orchids, did other household stuff (above and beyond dealing with shards of glass); and that was pretty much the day.