Last night, Nick and I were moving couches from the family room down to the basement. That's a pretty straightforward household chore that should have gone down pretty uneventfully, right? Tell that to my thumb, which is now on its eighth Band-Aid in the past 22 hours. Somehow, while carrying the second couch, I managed to strip off a one-half inch strip of skin at the base of my left thumb. It's been oozing blood and clear liquid ever since. Hence the need for so many replacement Band-Aids.
As if the cut wasn't bad enough, while moving the couches, I noticed a burned-out floodlight at the rear of our roof line, high above the patio. In over 11 years of living here, I've been waiting for one of those floodlights to burn itself out. Now, it had happened. I made a note to myself to change it this evening.
Tonight, after getting home and changing out of my work clothes, I went into the bathroom. I went to the window, raised it, and removed the screen. I noticed that the lightbulb wasn't just burned out; something had dislodged the glass bulb from the screw cap. It was hanging by a thin wire. This wasn't going to be a simple change.
Soon, I found myself hanging out the bathroom window, a good 20 feet above the patio. I was kind of perched with one knee on the windowsill and my upper body dangling in the air. I had a pair of needle-nose pliers in one hand and was hanging on for dear life with the other. "Good Lord," I thought. "How come every little chore becomes such a big deal for me?"
That's when my own little light bulb went off in my head. Instead of raising the bottom half of the window and hanging my butt out to dry in the danger zone, why not lower the top half of the window and stand securely inside the bathroom while fixing the bulb? Eureka! That was it. What a simple job it turned out to be.
I have to wonder why the easy approach didn't occur to me initially. My brain just doesn't seem to know how to handle basic household tasks. On further thought, I think that it's not that it doesn't know how to handle them -- it doesn't want to handle them. Imight need to work on that.