Baby, when the lights go out...

When the lights go out, it's time to replace them. But, if you're like my wee little condo association (there's only 5 owners--and maybe 1 or 2 of us that will do stuff), it takes a wee bit longer to replace them. Which is what (finally) happened last night.

After maybe a year of the lights on the 5 palms in the front of our building slowly going out one-by-one, I got up enough gumption to tackle replacing them (that's the 5 of them lit above: #4 has some overgrown shrubs around it, dampening its luster, but it's just on the other side of my gold car--i.e. not the fancy black one in the foreground). Assisted by a dallying sun, which had yet to set, I managed to have enough light to see what I was doing as I coerced the cap off one of the 4 not-lit lights (#3 in pic)--rust made that fun. Once off, I extracted (almost all of) the dead bulb, and proceeded to Home Depot to scope out replacements.

I returned from HD with 3 replacements in hand, and in the fading sunset began replacing the bulbs. The first went in relatively easily, with just a minor extraction of one of the tongs remaining from the former bulb to remove. Bulb in, bright light on, cap back on, and tree lit--the light's circular shadow floating in my eyeball was just a little bonus. I then moved on to the second palm (#2 in pic), struggled for a wee bit with the cap, got it off, bulb switched out and on, and cap back on.

Moving to my third and last replacement, I faced a decision: there were 3 trees left, but only 1 bulb. I went with the middle palm of the 3 (which is #5 in the pic), and began to attempt to get the cover off. After a fitful struggle, and not really getting anywhere, I decided to test out the other 2 options (hey, it was already dusk at that point and it's not exactly been cool of late--the latter, by the way, has motivated me to speed up my new car purchase). Back to the palms, my alternatives were for naught: the light on palm #4 turned out to seem just as difficult to get free of its cap as #5, and palm #6 turned out to not have a light (who knew?).

So, I trudged back to #5, and began in earnest to liberate the cap. In the process of doing so, I apparently shook the fixture enough to jiggle the existing bulb to get back in place, and suddenly had a fourth palm lit--sans bulb swap. With it lit, I moved back to #4, got the cap free, and eventually got the bulb in place (it was after dusk, and not really light anymore and I have apparently misplaced all my flashlights-dagnabit).

A wee bit later, I snapped the pic above, and then came in to post it. Then my camera decided to take a break, so posting was delayed to tonight. But that at least let me cool off and clean off the rust....


Baby, when the lights go out
Every single word could not express
The love and tenderness