Literally.
I don’t know how long it’s been since I needed to buy light bulbs; maybe five or six years, something like that.
I can’t remember exactly, but I had so many of them go out at the same time that I was compelled to navigate the light bulb aisle at a local home and hardware store.
I must have looked sufficiently confused because an employee walked over to me and said, “I’d ask you if you need help, but I can tell you do!”
I DID need help!
Apparently, I’ve been on another planet because the entire light bulb industry has changed while I’ve been gone.
Weird shaped bulbs, lumens, CFL, LED, halogen, incandescent, wattage, energy saving, HID, voice-enabled, smartphone technology–pretty soon even the light bulbs will be listening to our conversations like Alexa and Siri. It’s a whole new world.
I paid no attention to the lesson he gave me (sorry, nice man) but I told him what I wanted or what I used to have in the good old days, and let him choose the appropriate replacements.
They’re also way more expensive than they used to be, also a shock, but when I got home and restored illumination to previously darkened rooms, I was grateful for his kind assistance.
Enchanted Seashells by Princess Rosebud 
A shock, isn’t it? I’ve been through it too. One day my husband came home with a bunch of low energy light bulbs and began to take all the incandescent bulbs out of our lamps and put in the new ones. I looked at him incredulously asking what he planned to do with the old bulbs. Well, he put them in a bag. There was never a thought of, oh, I don’t know, waiting for our current bulbs to burn out and THEN replace them with new efficient bulbs. (face palm) And now we have a bag of partially used lightbulbs sitting around. Fortunately we’ve been using them in our pump house, where the heat of the bulbs helps keep our water pipes from freezing in the winter.
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Oh my goodness. I hear you! Well, at least you can still use the partially used ones. That’s similar to how I forget to toss out batteries cos what do you do with them? and they get mixed up with new ones. It’s like Russian roulette in a way. Will they work or not work and how long will they last?
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Oh, the battery thing. Fortunately I’m pretty good about getting rid of the old ones. But I can’t speak for everyone in my house. That said, we have a volt meter so we can check batteries to see if there’s still juice in them. When I was a kid we’d take a paper clip and unfold it and wrap one end around a flashlight bulb. They we’d put the bulb on one end of a battery and the end of the paperclip touching the other battery terminal, completing the circuit. If the bulb lit up the battery was still good.
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That’s a great science experiment! I’d still be afraid of getting a shock tho…
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No shock. I promise. Take a AA, AAA, C, or D battery and hold it by the ends. No shock. But don’t stick your tongue on the terminals of a little 9 volt square battery. That will shock you.
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I will wait until I see T. He loves experiments like this!
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I couldn’t believe how expensive lightbulbs have gotten when I recently went to get a four pack. If you don’t need anything fancy, The Dollar Tree sells them…one dollar each. XO
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I just went to the dollar store for fairy garden things and TOTALLY did not see this until I got home, oh well, another excuse to visit my fave store haha. Thanks for the suggestion, I need nothing fancy!
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