The lights in our ceiling fixture in the living room have been quietly expiring, one by one, over the years. Slowly they fade and go out, until there is just one dimly lit bulb and four dusty globes hovering over our head. The living room is dim and grey.
I could get some kind of A-frame ladder to replace them, but ladders that tall are expensive, and the ladder I _do_ have is too short.
As it turns out, Matt and I were going shopping together at Lowes, for Flipside supplies (of which I still have a number of odds and ends to pick up) and I mentioned I wanted to get a light-bulb grabber stick thingie for this. And he already had one! That he doesn't use!
Bonus.
So I retrieve it from the depths of his garage (well, Matt did the actual retrieving) and used it to extract the old bulbs. It did this quite nicely.
Then fiddled a bit but it would not put in the spiral fluorescents that I had. Sure, I could buy flourescent bulbs that were in an incandescent envelope (I think), but where's the fun in that?
So a little bit of hemming and hawing, and some fiddling about, and I was able to modify the bulb grippy thingy to work on spiral fluorescents.
Double bonus!
And now there is light. And it is bright, and nicely spectrumized!