If you measure it

...it will improve. An old management maxim.

Today is a new session for swimming lessons. HannahC has a new teacher. The new mommy'n'me class now has 3 bikini-clad moms. The original one looks pissed, as she's clearly the oldest of the three. She thinks she should get extra credit for that, but you don't get extra credit for having "for an old lady" appended to your description.

Most everyone is unsick now. The illnesses were short-lived, for the most part, though little Maxie-squirt-bottom seems to have hung on longer than anyone really needed it to.

This weekend was a particularly trying one at the C household. Saturday there was a lot of whining about being sick, followed immediately by a movement in the clock. People without small children see the end of Daylight Savings Time as a night where you get an extra hour of sleep. People with small children realize it is a day when they just get to be up an extra hour, because Jr. is going to get up at the crack of dawn as always, only that's going to be 5:30am Sunday morning, and The Older One, who can tell time, is still going to insist on staying up until 10pm Sunday night because her bed time is triggered by the wall clock.

I, of course, suffered in silence, as I am wont to do. There was quite enough complaining to go around despite my resolve, though.

Yesterday was the first day since we bought our house that all the light bulbs in the entrance-way chandelier worked. When we moved in to the house, there were burned out light bulbs all over the place. This house has too damned many bulbs. There are like 40 in the basement alone. The entrance-way chandelier has 16. Two were burned out.

So, first I discovered that I needed a taller ladder to reach the bulbs. My 6' A-frame ladder did no good in one of these 2-story vaulted ceiling things where the bottom of the chandelier is 12' above the ground, and naturally the 16' extension also was of no use given this hangs out in space away from any walls. So a couple months later, I bought one of those nifty convertible ladders that does a 13' A-frame as well as a 26' extension.

Then, I got up there and tried to unscrew the old light bulbs, with one breaking off in the socket. After much futzing with needle-nose pliers (no, the potato trick does not work), I got that out. Then, upon examination of the old lights, I realized they were 25W bulbs.

But I didn't own 25W bulbs. Nobody owns 25W bulbs. It's a useless denomination. Too dim to light anything up, but too bright to use as background mood lighting.

Unless, of course, you gang 16 of them together.

So I put the ladder away and queued this up for "next time you're at Lowe's."

Naturally, Lowe's doesn't carry 25W bulbs. They don't carry useless stuff. Only high-volume stuff.

So, I had to then queue it up for "next time you're at Ace."

Only I didn't remember for a couple months. Then I finally remembered and got some bulbs, but I was at Ace for some other task, so I set the bag down in the garage when I got home and went off and did that other task all day.

At some point, we reorganized the garage so I could park in there. I never saw those bulbs again.

Until last weekend when we were stowing some garden stuff up on the storage shelves, and I had to move some boxes to get the ladder over by the shelves, and the lid collapsed on one of the boxes, revealing two 2-packs of 25W light bulbs.

Ah Ha! The Mrs. immediately moved them from the garage to sit on the banister below the chandelier. Where they sat for a week.

So a week later, I had the ladder out on Saturday to remove a big-giant yellowjacket nest from the eaves that had mysteriously grown without anyone noticing it until all the leaves fell off the tree near it. Big. Like as big as The JohnnyB's head. Maybe bigger. I have pictures:

And since I had the ladder out on Saturday, when I was in the garage on Sunday, I saw the ladder and said, "now where in the hell did those light bulbs go?" After a few minutes of searching, I remembered where they were. So I replaced the bulbs.

From start to finish, just 14 months and two weeks.

Not bad, huh?