Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken.
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.
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 
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