light up my life

as you may or may not recall, EH and i have had a long-running dining room light dilemma.

because, as you may or may not recall, we suspended a bunch of paper globes from the ceiling to a) cover a truly atrocious light fixture and b) distract from our truly atrocious ceiling tiles, the only unfortunate outcome of this project being that one of the paper lanterns rested directly on the light bulbs that were left bare by the removal of the aforementioned truly atrocious light fixture. and turns out paper on top of a lightbulb is a hazardous combination. we polled all of our house guests for possible solutions, with the grand prize for the best solution being the chance to implement that solution for us, but oddly enough no one was really jumping at the chance to rewire our entire dining room, so we decided to take matters into our own hands.

the solution, we decided, was the remove the original lightbulbs all together, pretend as if the trappings of the aforementioned atrocious light fixture did not exist, and go with corded bulbs instead. the bulb could hang in the center of the globe, safely away from the flammable paper, and we could put the aforementioned atrocious ceiling tiles to good use by running the light bulb cords through the tiles, safely out of sight, and then discreetly down the wall to the outlet.

so, to review. the plan was: hang bulbs in the center of three of the globes. string the cords inside the ceiling, out of sight and out of mind. run the cords down the corner wall to the outlet. bask in glorious, artificial light.

{pause. i just sat here for five minutes playing through in my head that scene from mixed nuts when they are trying to decide what to do with stanley tenenbaum's body and felix proposes a two-step plan and phillip freaks out and says, "well, that's not really a plan, felix. a plan has to have more than two steps. a plan has to go, 'first we do this, and then we do this, and then we do this.'" i love that scene.}

this turned out to be easier planned than done. not because of any flaw in the plan, necessarily, but mostly because our arms are not 15 feet long and we could only shove the cord through the ceiling so far and then we would have to sort of guess how far the cord had made it and take down a bunch of tiles until we found it and then push it from there and rinse and repeat until the cord made it all the way to the corner. you might be interested to know that the space between the tiles are and the actual ceiling is big enough to fit my whole head. i know this from experience.

in the meantime, every time we popped out a tile, a steady stream of shards of sheetrock and other building materials would come raining down on our heads, dining room table and carpet. some of it also fell right down my shirt, a little surprise i discovered when i changed into my pajamas later that night. the fact that a dead bird or something even more disgusting didn't also fall out is proof that god lives and loves us.

it took us almost two hours. but, the happy ending of the story is that we did it! all by ourselves! and now, not only do we have cool paper globes hanging from our dining room ceiling, we also have lights in our dining room and our house will not burn down when we turn them on.

win, win, win.