After the Peak

A couple weeks ago the guy on the couch said something that I didn’t like.  So I bunched up a comforter and threw it at him.  I missed high and it sailed past him and knocked over the living room torchiere.  Glass everywhere.  Not only the torchiere glass broken but the bulb too.

So the living room has been very dark these past two weeks.  The guy and I have commented to each other a few times about how we miss being able to see.  But we’re lazy.  And have more important things to do, like defending the Earth.

Tonight, I thought I would do something productive, like cleaning up or going through stuff seeing as how I’m moving to London in about a month.  Most of that stuff is not in the living room — that is the areas the stuff is in actually is still adequately lit — but somehow with the living room being the big dark center of the apartment splitting the other areas into little islands of light, well, it was just too dark for productive activity to happen.

Then I had an idea that only took me two weeks to come up with: Even though I didn’t want to get a whole new torchiere right before moving, why not just go get a new bulb so that it will still light the room even if it’s got a broken glass head?  And that let to an even better thought: Didn’t I actually have a spare torchiere bulp sitting around in some random box of junk that I kept “just in case” any of it might be useful someday?

I did!  And I found it.  And plugged it in.  And…

LIGHT!

…

A short while later, I’m on the phone with my mom.  I pace continually while on the phone, and that was especially appropriate in this conversation as I was talking with her about all of my stuff that I don’t want any more and what to do with it, and so while talking I was pacing around surveying it all at the same time.

Eventually my pacing led me to the little nook between the kitchen and the bar that’s pretty much the most remote area of the apartment (ie, as far as pathfinding or line-of-sight goes).  The human brain has a very important visual filtering system that tosses away things that are always there.  Like always in the same place, a place that you see all the time, never altered or moved or changed in any way.  Like all the pictures on the shelf at Grandma’s house.

Or like the extra, not-broken torchiere that you didn’t need any more when you moved in and so stuck back in the corner of the nook behind the kitchen.

I told this story to my mom who got a kick out of it.  An extra torchiere bulp that only took me two weeks to remember that I had, and even better an extra torchiere that I wouldn’t have even remembered at all had I not been pacing around while talking to my mom about all the junk that I don’t want to move that I’ve been accumulating for years, you know, “just in case” any of it might be useful someday.

…

My mom didn’t get to hear the ultimate conclusion to the story, though.  Having a living room well-lit by a torchiere with a broken-up glass head was obviously not as good as I could do.  So I went to take the extra torchiere bulb out of the broken one in order to put it in the not broken one that I had found in the nook.

But even the little plastic bit holding the glass part of the bulb was a little hotter than I expected, and it turns out that a one inch fall onto the base of the torchiere head is enough to break a just-used-hot torchiere bulb.

So the living room is dark again.

And there’s now bits of glass on the linoleum again.

…

I guess I need to put my pants back on and go to the store and get a new bulb, or how am I going to get anything productive done?

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