semperfiona | Perhaps we can frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little ILLUMINATION!

Seven-letter Deborah's husband LB (and aren't they totally cute and schmoopy) is an electrician. For some time we've had no light in the kitchen, the front porch and the up- and downstairs hallways. The kitchen had a ceiling fan with light fixture, but the globe broke some while back. As a matter of fact, Ray broke the original globe while he was living in the house before our divorce; I bought a replacement but it never quite fit right. Eventually the replacement fell off and smashed. After that, the bulb also came loose and was hanging by its wires. We removed it, obviously, but since the over-the-sink fluorescent fixture also doesn't work, the kitchen remained unlit except for a lamp plugged in near the sink.

LB was finally free yesterday, and came round and installed a new ceiling fan and light kit in the kitchen. It's higher up, so

ohari won't be bashing his head on the lights (even I could barely walk under the old one). And they put 75-watt compact fluorescent bulbs in all four of the bulb sockets. Oh my. No phantoms will be hiding in the kitchen corners now!

He diagnoses the over-the-sink fluorescent's problem as dead ballasts/starters, and Chris is going to go to the hardware store today and pick some new ones up.

In both the front porch and upstairs hallway the fixtures are dead. The upstairs hallway fixture's wires had burned and melted, gods only know when or why, and the front porch fixture turns out to have been ill-suited to the purpose. It's an outdoor fixture, all right, but was intended to be used only under cover and not mounted on a brick wall. Moisture had gotten into it through the gaps between it and the bricks.

On the other hand, the problem with the hallway light downstairs turns out to be pilot error: all three bulbs were burned out. Now, to be fair to ourselves, they did all go at once and while the fixture was turned off, so it seemed like a wiring problem rather than a bulb problem.