A couple of bulbs in the lamp over the dining room table exploded last week. I may have mentioned that already.

I never did figure out why it would ever do that, which made both me and My Darling B a little nervous. It’s a little hard to relax and enjoy dinner with a lamp that wants to be a bomb hanging over our heads. It’s got a switch on it that turns off the ring of exploding bulbs and switches on a central, but much dimmer bulb, so for the past week we’ve been eating dinner in a sort of hazy twilight which, for some reason, made me squint a lot, as if that would help me see see my food.

When the bulbs blew, my first thought was to head down to Menard’s the very next evening, buy the cheapest ceiling lamp I could find, and install that until we could find a lamp we liked. I didn’t do that, though, for two very good reasons: I knew that, if I went through with installing a cheap-o ceiling lamp, then a cheap-o ceiling lamp is what we’d have in the dining room for at least the next ten years. Maybe forever. The second reason was, I’m very lazy. I didn’t want to install two lamps. Screw that.

So yesterday I finally made a trip to Madison Lighting, figuring that a shop that sold nothing but electric lights would have an enormous number of lamps of all kinds, and I would certainly be able to find one there that I liked. And I did, come to think of it. It had a sort of Scandinavian look to it and it cost four hundred fifty dollars. Thinking that I was in the artsy-fartsy corner of the store I walked on and found lamps that looked more like the stock I found on display in Menard’s, checked out the price tags of a few that appealed to me, and revised my estimation of where the artsy-fartsy lamps were. The whole shop appeared to be high-end. I kept walking until I made a complete circuit of all the display rooms and didn’t see one lamp selling for less that a hundred fifty bucks, and that was a single pendant lamp with a hand-blown glass globe about the size of an orange. I’m sure it was high-quality stuff, but I was going to need at least three pendant lamps to shed enough light to fill the dining room, and there was no way I was going to pay close to five-hundred bucks to do it, so I ambled toward the door.

And ended up at Menard’s. I still didn’t want to go that route, but we needed light in the dining room and, as it turned out, I was able to find a decent-looking pendant lamp in amongst the ones that looked like nausea incarnated. They were el cheapo but I was able to find some hardware to adapt them to track lighting and ended up spending just a hundred bucks and about three hours of my time to wire them up and hang them from a track, with pretty good results. Or so I’m telling myself. I won’t have to think about taking them down for at least ten years, anyway.