ain't gonna fool me again
In the past two weeks Harvey has knocked over the right-hand reading lamp in our living room, shattering lightbulb glass all over the floor, three times. We had just replaced the light bulb last night, with Dan telling Harvey in a very stern tone "These things cost five dollars each!" This morning I caught Harvey fingering the left-hand light and took it off the table as a punishment. I left in place, however, the right-hand lamp which, coincidentally, is the one he always seems to break. Which he did an hour later. Making me feel both dumb and strangely justified. And keen on getting a jump-start on my daily vacuuming. Man, those energy-saving bulbs really shatter.
And here's a quiz. If you take the bulb out of the package, use it for four hours, and then clean it off the floor with a giant vacuum that needs to run for five minutes to get up all the bits of glass, did you really save any energy?
Anyway, here's the lesson of today: Fool me once, shame on you. Destroy $15 of energy saving lightbulbs? Bye bye table lamps.
Which is sad, because we use this little corner of our living room to do many things, including reading, knitting, and studying bible with friends every Wednesday night. I can accept the loss of my own eyesight from knitting in the dim glow of a lamp ten feet away, but I feel bad inviting other folks into my home only to make them squint over The Word in semi-permeable darkness. I'm thinking of keeping our table lamps somewhere high and bringing them out only for bible study nights. Which is to say, bringing them out tonight and then forgetting the plan and leaving them there until Harvey breaks another light bulb and then remembering the plan again and putting them up high for another one-to-seven days and then repeating the cycle. Because I'm being rational about my own lamp rotating abilities.
I did a google search for child proof table lamp and came up with this cute one for only $150. Hmmmm, with the rate of bulb breakage in this house, that would pay for itself in only 30 weeks! Alternative plan: anyone know a local artist who can teach me how to cast in breakage-resistant polypropylene?