Much was accomplished today. Like, no bullshit. We got a lot done today.
The before pictures, keeping in mind that we’d already put a new light in the library. These lights are so goddamn old, guys:
The one on the table was the light in the entryway, and I want you to pay particular attention to that one, because it has fucking snowflakes on it for some reason, a thing I only ever noticed when I had to change bulbs and managed to annoy me anew every single time I had to do that job.
After, and yes, that’s a different light in the library, as we took the one we put in the library earlier this week and moved it to the entryway. The others are in the kitchen, bedroom hallway, and hall bathroom, respectively. The hall bathroom is the Bathroom of Terrible Decisions, a renovation project that has been ongoing for something like eight years and may actually be finished for real this weekend.
The after pictures:
The lights in the kitchen and the library match, the hallway lighting is hugely improved, and there are no longer fucking snowflakes on the light in my entryway. I am particularly pleased with the lights in the bathroom, which look stellar. The rest of the house feels astonishingly bright now, and there may be another project coming to add some dimmer switches, as the only place in the house with one is in the library.
I have had my arms above my head all day, and my shoulders are killing me.
I thought about putting an exclamation point at the end of my age up there– 47! — but that implies a level of excitement about this birthday that I don’t really feel. Honestly, I could do without it, and I’m feeling a little bit of stress about this one that I really don’t remember being there the last few times July 5 rolled around. Maybe it’s got something to do with yesterday being the hottest day in the history of the human race, or maybe it’s just that I’m undeniably in my late forties now, with 50 staring me in the fucking face, and I feel like my sudden realization earlier today that my hobbies haven’t changed noticeably since I was nine years old is kinda hitting harder than it deserves to as well.
But fuck it. I’m 47. That’s what 47 looks like on me. There’s a video going around on TikTok right now of a woman who claims to be 28 who looks at least a decade older than me so things could definitely be worse. And it’s not like I don’t know plenty of people who didn’t make it to 47 to complain about it, too.
(EDIT: This post is auto-linking to my birthday post from last year, which I also started with a selfie. I am wearing the exact same shirt today that I was wearing a year ago. Apparently the idea of wearing red the day after the 4th entertained me both years.)
Anyway, I’m an electrician now. This has been hanging in my former dining room/ current library since we moved in in March of 2011:
It had a bunch of dangly glass things with it that we removed almost immediately, and I’ve mostly been hitting my head on it since we moved the dining table into the other room. I finally took it down and replaced it today, with this significantly simpler model:
That’s an LED ceiling light, and you can adjust the temperature of the light. Right now my wife thinks it’s perfect and I think it’s too fucking white, so we can look forward to fighting over that for forever, but I don’t need to buy those stupid fire-shaped lightbulbs ever again. I also swapped out the existing dimmer switch with a newer one that was supposed to be specifically for LEDs. This is, as it turns out, a pretty simple job all around, mostly requiring convincing yourself that you’re not going to electrocute yourself while you’re doing it. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that my house has aluminum wiring, having been built during the five-year or so period where copper was hugely expensive for some reason. There are special little boxes you’re supposed to use to connect copper and aluminum wires, but again, they aren’t complicated either; they just make the job a little scarier.
I also discovered while swapping out the dimmer that it was installed wrong, and was in fact installed without the little boxes, which is basically exactly what you’re constantly told not to do when you’re working with that type of wiring– you don’t want to pigtail them together like you would with two copper wires, because something something science science and they can spark and cause a fire. I hope to hell that that dimmer switch was installed a lot later than the rest of the house (it would make sense that it was a late addition, since, after all, it used copper wire) and I’m really hoping that I’m not about to find out that every power switch in the house is installed incorrectly. Since this went off more or less without a hitch we’re going to swap out a few other fixtures that we’ve decided we don’t like, and while we’re doing it I’ll look at the switches and make sure they’re installed right.
The punch line to all of this is that now that it’s in I’m not sure I like the new light. It’s higher in the room than the chandelier was, as you might expect, and so it throws shadows on the books and statues and various and sundry other things in the room in a way that was very different from the chandelier; you can get some hints of what I mean from that picture above, although I wasn’t smart enough for a “before” image. We’ll see; I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I also haven’t seen it at night yet, so we’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of hours.
I have created an account at Bluesky— you can find me over there at @infinitefreetime.bsky.social— and so far I’m enjoying the place. It’s Twitter, basically; most of the differences are on the back end where the end-user is never going to see or notice them, and the main thing is that Elon Fucking Musk doesn’t own it. I’m trying to reconstruct my Twitter lists as much as possible; the lack of actual verification is a bit of a problem right now but since it’s still a small service and invite-only, impersonators aren’t really an issue. Hopefully it stays that way. I don’t have any invites yet, but if I happen to get a bunch I’ll let people know.
I drove to Indianapolis and back yesterday (well, went to Indianapolis round-trip; my wife did the driving on the home leg) came home, took a nap, and then that was pretty much my day. Today was the second day in a row my blood sugar level has gotten low enough to kick my ass and both times there have had to be naps afterward. I have a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks and I’m really hoping that she agrees to let me have a continuous glucose monitor because I’m tired of poking holes in my fingertips. I’ve mostly got my numbers under control right now– mostly through eating better– but getting low really sucks and the idea that a CGM warns you that it’s heading that way before you feel it really sounds like a good thing.
My birthday is the 5th. Buy me something. I’m going to be 47, and Christ, 47 feels old in a way 46 really didn’t.
Speaking of 47, now I’m looking at this and my brain is melting because I know I had a couple more things I wanted to talk about — Oh! I have officially been gifted a Prone Pillow, and it ought to be here in a few days, so you can look forward to that. I’ve been sent plenty of free books and ARCs over the ten years I’ve been doing this blog but I think this is the first time anyone has sent me any other kind of consumer goods to review. I have to admit to being slightly ashamed of myself– I wrote the dude back to say that I thought it was ridiculous for him to say my blog’s demographics were a “perfect match” for his product when I didn’t know my site’s demographics, and he pointed out that I’m an author and therefore my blog probably has a lot of people who like reading looking at it, and reading while lying on your stomach is one of the major use cases for his pillow.
Uh, yeah, that’s … that, uh, makes sense, and … uh … I’m kinda dumb sometimes okay shut up. Anyway, it’ll be here Friday or thereabouts so expect a review next week sometime.
I still feel like I’m forgetting something, but that’s what editing is for. Try not to blow any body parts off tomorrow, y’all.
This probably isn’t literally the biggest stack of books I’ve ever posted for this series, but I bet it’s close. Book of the Month is My Government Means to Kill Me, by Rasheed Newson, but there’s a bunch of good stuff here.
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