fiat lux

We’ve run into a slight hitch here at Our Humble O’Bode: We are temporarily without lights in our dining room and kitchen. At least I hope it’s temporary.

I was all geared up to do a little home improvement last weekend: I wanted to install some track lights in the kitchen. The fixture in there was just okay, sort of an artsy-fartsy-looking low-watt cluster of spotlights that we’ve muddled along with for twelve years. If the bulbs didn’t blow out so often, I might be inclined to keep muddling along, but the track lights I hung in the dining room threw so much light – a little too much, really – that I thought they’d work a treat in the kitchen.

Then I unscrewed the artsy-fartsy light fixture from the ceiling and discovered the wiring was so old the insulation crumbled to pieces, leaving bare wires.

I know just enough about electricity to replace a switch or a light fixture. And I know that bare wires can start a fire. I do not know enough to replace bare wires.

So until we get an electrician to fix this mess, the circuit is off and we don’t have lights in the kitchen or the dining room. The fridge is on another circuit, thank goodness. In fact, we lucked out with all the appliances: the clothes washer, the dish washer, the kettle to boil water for coffee – even the garbage disposal! Only the lights are affected.

I plugged a shop lamp in the wall and hung it from the ceiling in the dining room so we could go get our dinner out of the fridge, or stack the dirty dishes in the dish washer, without groping around in the darkness. I didn’t think of that right away; I did the dishes by candle light the first night. It wasn’t until the next morning when I was boiling water for coffee, that I realized I could plug a light into the wall socket that was still working.