(no subject)

Before the next round of Heat Alert Bingo, I will note the perfect beauty of yesterday evening. The refreshing breeze in the evening's cool, the sun on green trees, the coffee house that stays open to 8. Archetypal summer, which for me was 1980. I have the memory even though the feel of it is gone, as phantom recollections of other times do go.

One hot evening last month someone was burning wood and for a moment I was five years old at my cousins' 300 year old house in France, the summer of 1955, the adults drinking grapefruit flavoured soft drinks on the back terrasse looking out over the garden which to me stretched for miles with a multitude of winding lanes in and out of the bushes and trees. Adult me would have expected a ruined folly or a grotto with a picturesque hermit in it, 18th century wise. What there was was a kind of- rounded wigwam made of bent branches? way at the bottom of the yard, where there were slugs. Adult me could try to figure out how big the garden really was, but why bother? Let it stay enormous.

The soft drink was called Pschht! I believe, onomatopeia for the gassy noise it made, but very unfortunate in English.

There's a light on this tree that won't light on one side

My kitchen overhead fan/ light will not light. It lit Thursday night. It did not light Friday morning. The fan that runs from the wall switch beside it worked. So I took the globe off and removed the bulb and tried it in another lamp. It worked. So I went and looked at the fuse box, but the fuse for 'kitchen- west wall' looked fine. And anyway, the fan works...

So I reviewed contacts: electrician or handyman? If the fan had somehow jiggled a wire loose, which should I use? There's a dual switch for the light and I can't tell, when the light's not lighting, whether the current's on or off. An electrician would pull the fuse before looking at it, and surely a handyman would know to do so, but one hears stories where this has clearly not happened. Also electricians cost and do not like small jobs. And so, and so.

Thus kuyoing I went by Weiner's Home Hardware to get plastic scrub pads. WHH is staffed by a bunch of oyaji who've been there thirty years and more, some of whom may even be older than me: Weiner III, Santa Claus, Chinese Marty, and the black gay oyaji. The last of whom was there today and at leisure. I posed my problem to him. Hmm, he opined. 'You tested the light bulb? You tried the other switch? Overhead fan, does it have a switch on the fan itself someone might have pulled?' No one in the house but me, I say, and I didn't pull any of the fan switches recently- two weeks back to change the fan direction, that's all. 'Electrician,' he said, and I went to work calculating costs. Came home, and just to be sure, pulled the fan switches. One changes direction, one changes speed, and one-- turned on the light.

I am pleased, yes, but puzzled. Either I have gremlins or someone came into the house and turned the light on from the hanging switch, not knowing the wall switch would do it. Possibly I should go back to locking my front door.