Reading; Houses

Two days ago, I picked up a novel from the $2/5 bin of paperbacks at the local supermarket. It was The Bishop in the West Wing, by Andrew Greeley. I knew that it would be light reading, but I think even at that I probably overpaid. When you can skip, oh, eighty pages of text without losing anything from the plot, as I did toward the end, it's pretty light reading. So, to repay myself, I picked up two novels today from Borders. (Yes, I know I have a thick novel from the library that I've only read the first five pages of. That's the bedroom book. These are the everyplace-else books.) They're both by Jack McDevitt, who wrote the Polaris that I liked so much, and Eternity Road which I thought was good but not as magical as Polaris. The two are Seeker (I almost wrote Skeeter), and The Engines of God. We'll see how those go.

I'm in the mood to move rather than stay, again. The impetus is having spent forty minutes replacing a light switch in our bedroom. There were two surprises -- one was that the lamp that I was using as an indicator that power was well and truly off was (I remembered later) plugged into the socket we'd had added about ten years ago. Brzzap! Turns out it's wired in with the garage wiring. The other is that the wiring is thirty years old and very, very resistant to being manipulated. I don't want any real electricians looking at that switch. It's legal, but it's ugly, in the way that its in there. Oh, and after I was done, I realized that the switch is upside down. I told my wife that there's no way I'm taking it out again -- those damn wires slipped off the nuts twice before. I'm not giving them a third chance. But it got me to thinking about how you build houses, and how, in a perfect world, you would do it. It seems to me that for things that are obvious failure points, a house ought to have a method of gracefully accommodating you. (Graceful: sure, if we build a house, the builder will be in tune with that. You bet.) For example, you ought not to have to climb up on a ladder routinely to change ceiling lights -- the light source should be down low somewhere, with the light piped up. I know, that'd take power, but when I get to be eighty, I really don't want to fall off a chair changing a lightbulb. And switches - they're mechanical; they break. Whats needed is a magnetic coupling so that you pull out the defective switch and slap in a new one. Physically abutted against the house wiring, but without the need to pummel the wire into a little hole in the switch. I mean, really -- little holes in the switch? Whats next, having to use actual blades to cut people open in surgery?