How Many Piglets Does It Take?

I know I've left that annoying YouTube thingy on the top of my page for way too long, but I have been crippled (yes, crippled) with a headache. (Shut up.)

Now that I am relatively free of pain, I would have had more time to write, but I had to change a light bulb. Removing the old light bulb took one bar stool, one rubber pot holder, three sets of pliers, one plastic bag, one hammer, and two potatoes.

I tried to remove the light bulb two weeks ago, and could not get a grip on it to twist it loose. It's one of those floodlight-shaped bulbs that you put in those can lights that look fabulous and put out just enough light to read your watch by if you are situated directly underneath one. But that's what the bathroom (yes, the bathroom) has for light, so that is what I will maintain until the day we are free of debt and young-adult car insurance payments and can replace them with sane fixtures.


Drew tried a week ago, but he gave up too. The trouble is that you can't get your fingers around it because it fits so snugly in its little round "can," so you have to try to will your fingers to be sticky like a gecko to the top surface to get it to twist. But it was in there good. Drew tried to take the whole fixture apart to find a back way in, but the thing is surrounded by an impenetrable sphere of bad taste.

Today I had the time to go all in on the thing, so I placed the bar stool underneath it, got on my tippy toes on the bar stool, thought "gecko fingers" and cranked it.

Nothing.

So I gingerly climbed down off the bar stool and went to the kitchen for my magic silicone pot holder, thinking that maybe it might be just sticky enough to get the thing moving.

Nope.

So I gingerly climbed down off the bar stool and looked for some weapons of destruction. I decided that we would never be able to get our fingers around the thing, so I had no choice but to take it out and unscrew the pieces. Back up on the tippy bar stool. Back up on my tippy toes. I covered the bulb with a plastic bag, and whacked it through the bag with a hammer. Voila, shards of glass in the plastic bag, none in my eyes directly below the action. Brilliant. Now to get what's left of the bulb unscrewed. I grabbed for my silicone pot holder, but it wouldn't fit in the damn hole.

So I gingerly climbed down off the bar stool to find some more weapons. I found some adjustable wrenches and pliers in the garage and padded back in to give them a shot. It turns out that when you whack a light bulb with a hammer and then take a wrench to it, more shards of glass rain down on you from above.

So I gingerly climbed down off the bar stool to find another weapon. I remember reading something, probably in one of those Hints from Heloise things that used to be popular when there were people who devoted their lives to cleanliness, that if you had a broken light bulb, you could get it out of the socket by cutting a potato in half, sticking the cut end of the potato into the glass-sharded end of the bulb, twisting and saying Ta-Da.

Two cut potatoes later, I had two potatoes with lovely swirls cut into their ends by highly sharp glass shards, and a light bulb still stuck in the socket.

So I gingerly climbed down off the bar stool to find another weapon. I was out of ideas, but I still had a pair of pliers I hadn't tried. I already had glass in my hair and on the floor, so I was no longer in fear of a little glass up the nose. By the time my face was glittered up enough for the junior high prom, I had worried the end of the bulb out of the socket by twisting it up with my pliers. An inelegant solution, but a solution nevertheless.

So I gingerly climbed down off the bar stool, shook myself off, threw away the bulb along with the potatoes, and vacuumed the floor.

So what did you do today?