And Then Pop Goes The Spot….

You have to feel so sorry for those poor water dwellers down Somerset the ways but let me tell ya, I’ve had problems of my own!!

In the kitchen there are six recessed lights. These lights are of the mushroom lookin’ spot or flood type lamps, or bulbs as we’re wont to call them.  I believe I’ve only had to change one of these screw in lamps since moving here.

Yesterday I was witness to something I’ve never seen before.

Round about teatime her indoors and I prepared to the kitchen to see if the cupboards were still bare or if they’d miraculously replenished themselves.*

I went in. She followed me in. I hit the light-switch. The lights came on. Instantly there was a very loud ‘POP’. One of the lamps, rather than popping and dying, as bulbs are wont to do, exploded into a gazillion bits of glass and reflective material! Quite spectacular!

Fortunately, I was well clear of this exploding lamp. Unfortunately, my little nest of vipers was standing directly below the big bang bulb. As I broke out in loud laughter, having ascertained no injuries had been sustained, she broke out into a diatribe of foreign words, enunciated as only foreign people can enunciate foreign words, seemingly all strung together, spoken quite loudly and  all accompanied with uncoordinated hand flapping. With my raucous laughter and her loud, long foreign word usage, anyone outside happening to hear us would’ve been forgiven for thinking they were passing the hyena house of a small safari park.

Slowly, as my laughter subsided and her indoors ran out of foreign words suitable for expressing her feelings towards bulbs that go bang above her head, we surveyed our surroundings.

I would never have believed one mushroom lookin’ lamp could contain that amount of glass when seen spread about in bits of less than a millimetre square.  That’s not taking into account what her indoors had hidden in her hair by the way. Needless to say, the clean-up took forever. Actually, it took a couple of hours so the last sentence was, indeed, needlessly said. It took considerably longer to ensure her hair was finally glass particle free. Some time was lost in this endeavour as I tried various lighting effects on her head, some of which resulted in quite spectacular reflective results.

Now what to do? Get a new mushroom lamp? I’m guessing it’d have to be new as I don’t believe they sell used bulbs at this time. Problem with that is even if I spent from now ‘till November I’d never convince her that a mushroom lamp is never going to explode on us again so, just in case we decided to do other stuff between now and then, we went and got LED spots to replace all the mushrooms.

Boy!! Are those LED spot suckers expensive or wot!! On the plus side, according to the packaging, these guys will still be pouring forth their mediocre light long after my main fuse has finally blown.

*The cupboards were bare.

Quote;  Lucinda Williams.

“So few people are truly themselves when they're in the spotlight.”