A light in the darkness

I have this problem with laziness.

Imagine, for example a lamp in my living room had a bulb burn out. Say, just to pick a lamp at random, it’s the lamp by DH’s chair. It is one of 4 lamps in a sort of lamp triangle lighting arrangement so it’s light is useful but not technically necessary to normal living room activities, like reading a book, watching tv, playing with legos, surfing the web, etc. You can still do all this, it’s just less bright.

It could be days before that bulb gets changed. Even weeks.

Partly it never happens sooner because I only notice it when I am in the middle of something else & I never remember it later. Partly I put it off because I am sure we have no bulbs and I’ll have to remember to buy them. Partly I am thinking “It’s by DH’s chair, surely he’ll notice & change it” But that never happens. (nor does he say “Honey we need light bulbs”, so I know he hasn’t attempted to replace it & been stymied by an absence of them).

I have a phobia of some sort about stocking up on light bulbs. Everything else I have multiples of. I have 5 jars of Skippy Natural peanut butter. I have 14 Scotch bright sponges and 3 jugs of dishwasher liquid.

I have 2 spare bulbs, both 40 watts with those tiny little bases that don’t screw into any fixture in my house & probably I absentmindedly bought them by accident. But I have to keep them in case I am mistaken and there is a fixture that uses them, or maybe the fridge does, or the stove.

I think this phobia is left over from when we moved every year and every apartment had different sized fixtures in the bathroom & I never could remember if this place was small bases or wide bases, or if i need the short fluorescents or the big ones and I always bought the wrong bulbs.

For me, buying light bulbs is like buying hardware. I pretty much have to take the thing I am replacing with me to buy a new one.

Even then I end up having random drawer pulls & bolts & light bulbs in my car or purse for months before I think about them.

Overhead lighting fixtures with 3 bulbs? They never get 1 bulb changed. I always wait until a second bulb goes. If I have to get the step ladder out & then risk having heavy glass fixtures fall on my face while I remove or replace them, it had better be worth my time. Plus by the time I get around to buying the replacement bulb for the first one, a second one has usually blow as well.

In my defense… I am not the only person in this house who uses the lighting. At least one, possibly two, other people could notice the burned out bulb and replace it, depending on location. One of those people doesn’t need a step ladder to replace most of the overhead light bulbs.

But I have always replaced the bulbs eventually. I have inadvertently taught them this behavior. The others have come to expect only I change bulbs and simply live in the dimness until I get around to it. “Better to sit in the dimness than curse about how long it takes to get a light bulb changed around here” being their philosophy

If something were to happen to me and I would not be around long enough for all the bulbs in a room to blow, I think probably they would start moving working lamps around rather than change the dead bulbs.

They would of course, have to do it while struggling through knee high drifts of dirty socks.

This post inspired by the fact that two weeks later I had to cannibalize a working but little used lamp in the junk room in order for there to be one working bulb in the boys room.

I’m going to buy bulbs tomorrow. I swear.