Flirting with Electricity

You might not know this but I am one of those tool belt divas. As a child, I preferred to play with my Roy Toy log cabin building set over my cabbage patch dolls any day. The process of creating or building always took precedent to whether or not Barbie was pissed off at Ken that day for not stopping and getting gas for the pink convertible.

To fuel my constructive fire was none other then my father who was once a master carpenter. He took me under his wing and taught me a few tricks of the trade that has been stored in my noggin amongst other stuff. :) Besides that, being a single woman with the power of Google at her fingertips, access to all the how-to tutorials is just a click of a button away, I have managed to stock up on some crafty knowledge over the years.

For the past couple of years my mother has complained that the fluorescent light in my bathroom emits this highly annoying buzzing sound. I never heard it so I contributed it to my mother hearing things instead of my inability to hear. :) Amazingly, when I got my cochlear implant I realized she wasn’t suffering from auditory hallucinations, the light really does buzz like a bitch.

Well, buzzy stopped working about three weeks ago. I’m not a princess by any means but I have a hard time functioning in the morning without some source of illumination. Since I am handy around the house my first thought was bulb blew. I took the old one to Home Depot and matched it up with a new one. I came home popped in it – Viola, it worked!

Three days later, it stopped working.

I kick start the process of deductive reasoning which led me to the possibility of a bad ballast (this thing that makes fluorescent light start, kind of resembles a big old bug). As it turns out, it takes just 20 minutes of your time and a quick trip to Home Depot to fix it. I was hesitant at first to replace the ballast – because it means messing with electrical wires.

Electricity + Cochlear Implant = The outcome can't be good.

The possibility of frying my mapping off the implant didn't sit well with me, actually the idea of being fried period didn't sit so well with me either . Therefore, I exercised extreme caution – I turned off the electricity off to whole house. Of course I had to do it when my mother was watching a movie that she has been waiting thirty some odd years to see. Whoops. I got down to business and dilly-dallied with the wires, a little cutting and stripping here and there. It was very simple: white-to-white, black-to-black, blue-to-blue and red to red. In the end, when I flipped the switch, it worked!

A week later, it stopped working.

I am getting tired of playing this game. I strapped my tool belt back on and waddled to Home Depot to pick up some switches and wire nuts. I decided to replace all three switches for esthetic purposes. I shut off power to the entire house again and started to rip the switches out of the wall and replace them – one by one. I screwed everything back together, turned the power back on and flipped the switch and my goodness gracious, great balls of fire I got light!!!

Now my outlet in my living room does not work :)