Page 79 - Gilbert & Me_Neat

Day Seventeen

Saturday, April 25 , 2020
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6.35am:
Finally, I’ve been able to wake up from a period of actual sleep! From around 11.40pm until
around 2am, I’ve been kept awake by those darn adolescents next door because they’ve been
watching a movie, loudly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Yvonne has a word later today. It’s getting
annoying now. They appear to have lost it and aren’t considering us neighbours at all. If she
doesn’t, I might make some noise about them myself.

They watch pretty violent movies and listen to the strangest, most boring, repetitive music I have
ever heard.

Now, I’m not suggesting that my taste in music is anything to judge, but at least mine has a beat,
and you can usually understand the lyrics enough to sing along enthusiastically. Like who, I hear
you ask? Well, Donna Summer, Abba, OneRepublic, Elton John, Take That, Jodi Mitchell (okay,
she’s a bit weird), Coldplay, Lionel Ritchie, Adele, Ellie Goulden, Pentatonix... Yes, yes old
school, but that’s me.

Anyway….
Definitely need coffee this morning, like, right now.

Three cups later…..

Buzzing. What can be achieved today? I know: I can finally change out that old fashioned, two-
bulb-but-only-one-works ceiling light in the hall.

I have a square LED ceiling light currently in the kitchen and a round LED blue-ring light there
as well, but hanging on the wall. This light has two light settings – actually three: you can have
just the outer blue ring on, or the inner white round light, or both together. It’s cool. What if I
change those over – put the blue-ring light on the ceiling and relocate the square one into the hall
to replace the old fashioned one? Seems like a plan. I get to it.

The lights in the kitchen come down easy, but, man, that hall light was a problem; it should have
been a relatively simple task to take down: There’s a central bolt which holds the patterned glass
shade to the fixture attached to the ceiling. Normally, you just unscrew the decorating nut in the
center of the glass shade and carefully take it down, but this bolt is just spinning round, nothing
is getting loose. Eventually, I use some force to pull the bolt downwards, enough to cause it to
grip the plasterboard ceiling and thus gain enough traction to unscrew. With the glass shade