Wednesday, February 8, 2017

The Clock Strikes Nine

It is a balmy Wednesday night.
I went out last night, after having fretted over the decision, and made 5 dollars and some change.

My rationale for staying in on a Tuesday is usually some variant of: I need the rest, I need to change my strings and don't want to use the new ones to play for an almost empty street, or often: I'm probably only passing up 5 dollars and change by staying in.

I looked at the 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle for 5 bucks at the dollar store, putting it back on the shelf, telling myself that I am only trying to find a way to avoid the work that is in front of me, with the Mardi Gras coming.

Avoidance

A similar thing used to happen towards the end of summer vacation when I was a school kid. I would swear that, if I could just have another few weeks of vacation, I would build that balsa wood airplane and fly it...even though I had all summer to do it and didn't.
 
This is the the time of year where serious hard work, and setting aside things like jigsaw puzzles to focus upon it, will pay off with plenty of puzzles and time to do them come July.

I bought a little LED light for a dollar. It runs on 3 AAA batteries (included, for a dollar!) and is almost as bright as the one I have been using for over a year that I haven't been able to find a replacement for, as it has no identifying labels on it.

Of course, if I Google battery powered LED lights, I would probably come across the model within a few pages of photos. I like the one I have because, in the past year the vine that I hang it from at the Lilly Pad has actually grown kind of a cradle for it. One theory is that it emits heat which the vines try to wrap themselves around, another is that Lilly has power over even the vegetation that grows on her wall and has commanded the vine to hold my light for me.

My search for lights online lead me to a bunch of them that seem to be only about how bright they are, with their "amazing" lithium-ion technology. I don't need to light up the 3 city blocks around me with something that fits in my pocket, even though the batteries would do so for up to 25 minutes.
I really can't go wrong with these one dollar ones, which are decently bright with the standard batteries included, and will most likely give me performance comparable to the light that I have (which one day soon, I fear, will be beyond being whacked against my leg into life) if I use "alkaline" batteries in them.

So, that is the story here. It is already time for me to go, to see what I can follow up a $5 night with.

1 comment:

  1. The nice thing about $1 lights is, you're gonna lose them but they're cheap to replace.

    I'd prioritize anything that makes your real on the street performance better. Let the Kool Kids with their solid-gold iPhones and $500 a month connect plans take care of the video.

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