Reigniting the Spark

You know, sometimes you just lose it, that little spark that puts the twinkle in your eyes. We lost ours Sunday evening. As we sat down to dinner, I turned on a lamp near the table and the bulb went out. It was followed by a crackling sound in the wall near the light switch that controls the outlet the lamp was plugged in to. And darkness reigned in our home.

Unfortunately it wasn't a simple matter of resetting the breaker. But luckily for us it only impacted half of the house. Unluckily the master bedroom and bathroom is on that side of the house. I say unluckily because that meant we need to plug in the alarm clock elsewhere in the house, which of course meant we needed to sleep near it in order to hear it in the morning. Yep, we spend Sunday night sleeping on the living room floor. The cats thought it was fun.

Anyhow, I worked from home Monday and Tuesday while we made the necessary repairs. We called in a licensed handyman and he tested all the outlets and switches in that circuit to try and pinpoint the short. He finally isolated where it was in the walls, but couldn't actually locate the broken section, so he ran new wire through the walls and just bypassed the short. Works for me.

This search, of course, involved cutting huge sections of drywall from the walls, thankfully that work was limited to the garage. He did a pretty good job of putting the walls back together too.

Of course, since the repairman needed to work in the garage, we needed to pull all our crappe away from the walls so he could search for outlets and do the work. And in order to pull things away from the wall, we needed to move Sweetie's car out of the garage. The battery has been dead for about 4 months. Sweetie doesn't drive much.

On the plus side, we now have power throughout the house. Also on the plus side, Sweetie finally put a fresh battery in his car (Yea!). On the down side, the contents of our garage are now piled in the middle of the garage floor. We've had most of this crappe since we moved in, 6 years ago. I'm hoping we'll finally be able to part with some of it.