Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken.
Probably it's completely safe.
We were having a rainy and cold Saturday evening. The husband was fussing with the 1920s ceiling light we found at Buffalo Reuse last weekend. It was tucked up in a back room of that cavernous, dark, and very, very grungy retail outlet for parts yanked out of “green” demolition projects. Stacks of tiles torn from bathroom walls (the husband is still fighting an infected cut from one of those), old toilets (I mean used toilets, really really used toilets), doors, windows, tin ceiling chunks, and other house bits are piled next to only slightly worn tanks of corrosive fluid.
Anyway, the husband had just discovered that with careful use of Bon Ami he could remove the filth crust of nearly 100 years to make the molded milky glass of the light gleam like new. All that remained was to replace the dangerously inept 1970s era rewiring with new, legal, and safe wiring and we (meaning “he”) could hang it in the upstairs foyer. The wiring he took out of that poor light fixture was thick and patinated, melted copper wire forcibly shoved through the historic porcelain sockets. I can’t believe the whole thing hadn’t caught the house it lived in on fire – although maybe it had. It was at Buffalo Reuse because its old house had been torn down as too useless for even the crack and meth demons.
So on this cold Saturday evening the husband wandered from the dining room, where the lamp was laid out in bits, into the kitchen, where the beer is kept. I heard the fridge door open and shut. A few steps and the bottle opener drawer squealed open. Fzzt. The bottle cap clanked onto the counter. He wandered back into the dining room and drank some beer while looking down at the lamp bits. Deciding something, he plonked his beer down in the mess of lamp parts. He picked up one of the bulb sockets and inspected it. With his other hand he gave himself some beer. Plonked the bottle back down. This went on for a little while. I wasn’t exactly watching events, but it wasn’t a real exciting night around the homestead so I was, well let’s say I was aware. There may have been more than the one beer. It is at least possible that there were a few beers. That can happen on a Saturday.
1920s ceiling light, during beery rewiring.
The husband settled himself at the table and picked up the coil of new wiring. He sort of held it up to one of the sockets. Measuring like. I thought about that for a moment. I flashed it through in my head, seeing him wiring the lamp, putting it back together, hanging it upstairs, admiring it, and then I imagined the cascade of sparks showering from it because maybe, just perhaps, something went a little wrong, a little beery in the rewiring. The husband is sort of like a savant with this kind of stuff, but I kept thinking about the beer.
I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “Do you think it’s smart to do that when you’re drinking beer?”
You know what he said.
And now you can wonder about that lamp, the house, his ability to be awesome. And you might be examining the image for the kind of beer. Because obviously, some beers lend themselves to rewiring antique ceiling fixtures and awesomeness better than others.
wideeyedfunk 
My husband once built a wall that was meant to divid a bedroom and bathroom while partaking in a few beers with his friend. Actually they built the same wall three times. That was twenty years ago and the wall still does not meet the ceiling. Awesome!
Beery home renovation is a sport! Some losses, some wins –
Just for the record…beer does not hamper my ability to be awesome. On the contrary…it enhances it! Yeah, so maybe I didn’t end up re-wiring the light that evening, but it had nothing to do with my beer intake. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
uh huh.
All I can say is that there is a bathroom wall in a house on Stagecoach Road in Marmora that never fell down. It might not be exactly straight, but it does it’s job, forcing people to use the door.
I am laughing. What do you need aside from pure function? I mean, anything else is just being overly fussy.
Brings to mind memories from a while back of a suddenly silent barn door on the Fisher Price Farm House that USED to say “Moo” when you opened it, (Why? How?) transistor radios, alarm clocks, wrist watches that needed redesigning….. A mental picture of an entire family on our hands and knees looking for a lost spring or wire that had to be found because “maybe Katie ate it”. 🙂
The questions of myself, that eras “doubting Thomas”, and the usual reply “Have you no faith? Do you REALLLLLLLLLLLY think that I can’t get this back together again and running better than before?” The truth, sometimes yes and sometimes no?!
No beer involved at this point in time, more likely the WHOLE container of milk. But if beer had been the drink of choice it would have been something frothy and dark.
Quite an interesting fellow this husband of yours and offspring of mine…ya gotta love him!
Good to hear that there is a history of “fixing” items. We once had a “fixed” coffee maker around here that sort of a little bit exploded…I hope for better things from the light!
It has all become very clear to me now. I see now I was once an evolving creature, animate and inanimate. Consisting of refuse from various household electronic dismemberment, spare parts and copper wiring all mine for the taking!!!! What toddler would not feast on such a smorgasborg? Part person, part machine, if you plug me in, do I not…spark a little?
We at the Tuckahoe homestead know that the ‘husband’ can rewire ancient Rube Goldberg devices while surrounding half a six pack.
Evidence that beer does not impair his awesomeness! He’ll be so pleased! And probably immediately find justification for layering in some beer…
Pingback: Twenty things I could have bought with the $20 I lost yesterday. « wideeyedfunk
Pingback: I know I would paint better if I had a pair of Dickies painters pants. « wideeyedfunk