Kitchen Corner

     Living in a house with eleven-foot ceilings has its own challenges, one of which is changing light bulbs in the ceiling fixtures.  It’s a job that I gave up some years back, right along with anything else that requires a ladder.  I don’t do well on ladders.
     Even Nyel, at six-feet-two needs a ladder for changing most of our light bulbs.  No problem.  But, he also needs two arms and hands to remove the fixtures that have glass globes (in the biz they call them ‘fitter shades’) encasing the bulbs. Wouldn’t you know that one of our kitchen lights went out the day we came back from his rotator cuff surgery?  Bad enough that we have to put up with my cooking.  My cooking in semi-darkness compounds the problem.
     Of course, we didn’t have a 200 watt bulb.  Easy remedy: Jack’s Country Store.  And last night I commandeered our friend Mark (also six-two) to change the bulb.  The kitchen ceilings are a bit lower than those in the rest of the house and,, although it was a stretch, Mark could reach the fixture sans ladder and take the globe off the offending light.  But the new light bulb didn’t work.  After several changes between the new and old bulb, we finally tried a 100 watter and voilà!  Hard to believe that a bulb purchased at Jack’s was no good but, as they say, “There’s a first time for everything!”
     And speaking of lightbulbs… the low beam on the driver’s side headlight of our PT Cruiser went out last week.  We realized it when we came out of a friend’s house in Long Beach and thought, wrongly as it turned out, that we could easily drive from there to Oysterville without a problem – high beams on until an oncoming car approached, then switch to (the one) low beam.  We were just past the northern city limits when a State Trooper stopped us.
     He pleasantly pointed out that we had only one light.  We explained and he said not to use our high beams – just the low beams, even though there was only the passenger-side light.  Seemed wrong to us but…
     The following day Nyel looked into changing that bulb – at least we hoped that was the extent of the problem.  Well, not exactly.  It was, in fact, just the bulb, but in order to change it, the wheel has to be removed and the bulb replaced from underneath the car.   As can be imagined, that information did not sit well.  There was considerable mention of ‘the old days when cars were cars’ and ‘built-in job security’ and other stuff, not so nice.
     Yesterday I took the car to a local mechanic who put it up on his hoist, took off the left front wheel, and replaced the light bulb – all for $34.00 which we actually thought, by that time, was a bargain.  Who knew that light bulbs would ever become the bane of our existence?  I’m sure there is a Polish joke here somewhere…