Monday 18 December 2006

Light Fitting Frustration

Did the bulk of the Christmas food shopping on Saturday, followed by a second expedition on Sunday to locate a Goose. We've had goose (rather than Turkey or other festive meat) for a number of years now, and though these days a lot dearer (gone are the days when you could send out a small urchin to fetch you one) than the alternatives, I still think that it's worth it. (The checkout girl shrieked when she saw that it was 30 quid, then asked me if it was nice, with the comment "it should be at that price").

Spent the best part of Sunday replacing the light fitting that shorted itself out last week. Bought what we thought looked like a nice fitting from B&Q. The fitting was called "ORBIT". Spent about 5 hours fitting it!

There was the usual trouble with drilling holes in crumbly ceilings, and trying to work out how the household wiring relates to the given circuit diagram. I took these problems as par for the course.

What I wasn't expecting was having to assemble in place on the ceiling, what can only be described as a large dalek eyepiece crafted in glass, joined together with screw-in metal rods and plastic transparent washers.

The joys of trying not to shatter the glass, make the rods fit into the holes drilled into the glass, find the transparent washers dropped on the floor, hold the whole thing in one hand whilst trying to do up a nut with the other.

To top this, if when I need to change one of the two bulbs I'll have to disassemble all 3 glass rings of the "dalek eyepiece", remove the glass eye/diffuser, change the bulb(s) then fit the whole lot back together again without breaking anything. Not looking forward to this.

I'm also going to have to remember to be very careful when swinging ladders around to get into the loft hatch, or there'll be a shower of broken glass, reminiscent of scenes from the first Superman film.

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