this weekend

[forgotten_aria]

Boring post, mostly for my own records.

My closet light stopped working at the start of the week. I bought a replacement LED bulb (it was an old florescent tube. It stopped working again. I put the tube in G's closet, it came half on. Best theory is the ballast was going and had damaged the new bulb (we tried all the old bulbs in various locations to try to make sure of this. I decided I had to replace it. Turns out hard wired (as apposed to plug in) 3ft long fixtures are rare and all long fixtures are either kind of costly or dim. I bought a 2ft one, but when I got the old one off the wall, found out there were TWO giant holes where the wires from the switch were coming in right at the edge of the 3ft. So I had to decided what to do. I tried several positions with the 2ft and decided I had to get something else. I ended up with a 12" square, installing a junction box (I bought the wrong kind, so I had to cut off the tabs) in the holes (why wasn't this done in the first place?) and centering the light on the hole (which puts it off to one side, but the square looks fine like that.) I finished installing it Saturday. I try to avoid electrical work, but I felt comfortable doing this job.

This delayed me getting the wood for my birthday present to myself. So today I went and got it Sunday. First I was annoyed that the 16ft long posts were $3 cheaper than the 12ft, but they couldn't cut them and my car couldn't take them. Turns out that my car can take a 12ft 2x4, but not a 4x4 and not a whole stack of them. As I was trying to get them all in I ended up cracking my front windshield. I ended up ratchet strapping the door slightly ajar and taking the back roads home, window down to make sure I wasn't sucking exhaust.

Tomorrow I'll have to find a windshield repair place to come look at it, but since the crack is on the inside, I'm a little worried they won't know how to do it right.

I'm feeling like my project is a little cursed.