Way back in October, my front porch light stopped working.

I thought it had just burned out, so I climbed up on a step ladder, and I replaced the bulb. Problem was, the new bulb didn't light, so Anne and I thought, "Oh, great. Now we're going to have to pay an electrician hundreds of dollars to fix this," and we haven't had a front porch light since.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the light fixtures in my kitchen started flickering and sputtering whenever I'd turn it on. It did this for weeks, and it finally stopped turning on, at all, about 3 weeks ago. Around this time, we noticed that we had rats in our crawlspace (we don't have attics here in Los Angeles), and we both assumed that they had been chewing on the wiring.

We called an electrician about the problem, and he said he'd come out and look at it, but he never showed up. I called him three times, and he never called me back, so, last night, we called my wife's brother, who is really handy, and asked him what to do. This morning, we took down the fixture in the kitchen, and found that the wiring problem was not in the walls, but was in the fixture, itself. All we have to do is get a "wire net" for a few bucks at Home Depot, and re-hang the fixture. Total savings to us, for not having an electrician come out and tell us this? Well over $200.

Emboldened by our success in the kitchen, we went to the porch, to see if we could puzzle that one out...I took a new light bulb out there, and screwed it in...and it lit up. Turns out that the bulb I used in October was already burned out.

That's right. We could have had a front porch light all these months, but I wasn't able to discern the difference between a burned out bulb, and a working bulb.

The moral of the story? When you think it's the wiring, the problem may just be the bulb.

I'm Wil, and that's one to grow on.