Naked light fixtures

I just had a funny/traumatic experience in my kitchen last night.

It's a long story: the lightbulbs in my kitchen overhead light burned out on Friday. A friend from grad school was over on Saturday because we were going to see a matinee of the Reader and we had some time before the movie, so I made him get up on a ladder and change the bulbs. Well. we were yakking (my bad), no doubt about the limitations of depicting the Holocaust in film or criticizing the rationale of recent Supreme Court decisions (yes, we really do talk about stuff like that) and he got distracted and didn't screw the light fixture cover back on properly.

So, just after I finished cooking dinner last night and was moving away from the stove to get something from the cupboard above the sink, the glass light fixture cover came crashing to the floor.

Luckily neither I nor my kitty Tati was standing under it--and I would have been if I were still cooking--because one of us would have been badly hurt or even killed if it had been a direct hit. That thing was really heavy. I am still shaking. I finished sweeping up the glass but vacuuming up the dust took some time. It shattered into a million little pieces, and of course, Tati wanted to investigate, so I had to keep shooing her out of the kitchen.

Normally I would get up on a ladder, no problem, but I broke my leg (a really long story) last year and I am still nervous about getting up on ladders. Ugh. Need to get over that.

With the naked light fixture the kitchen now officially looks Depression era (the house was built in the 1942) but not in a good way. Quilting projects with repro 1930s feedsacks--cute. Naked lightbulbs--depressing in a Walker Evans kind of way. I feel as if I should be packing the pick-up and heading to California to pick grapes with the Joad family.

On that note I will post some appropriate music for the drive. Covers of "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" from, of course, YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKSKjqn9Pw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7j7oDN1VGk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHqPGTMSn1s


(Be sure to check out the first one. It's very groovaliciously 1960s).