Projects with Dad

I was helping my dad with a project in his basement involving the overhead lights.  They are the industrial lights with the long lightbulbs.  This project involved changing out the ballasts in several of the lights.  We get to the first light and take off the light cover exposing the bulbs... no issue there.  We remove the bulbs, and get at the cover behind the bulbs.  As we remove the metal plate getting to the guts of the unit my dad and I are showered with seed shells and mouse poop.  AAHHHH!  I was on the ground, so I tried to duck away from that shower asap.  My poor dad was standing on a chair and just had to stand there and take it.  He did a few head shakes to dislodge any unwanted particles from the top of his head.  Mice seem to be a part of the deal with this house that is in the middle of the woods.  In my dad's words... "Mice will do anything to get into a warm place when it gets cold outside. Including chewing holes through the walls."  Apparently in the guts of this light fixture was a nice warm place for at least one of these furry creatures.  Yuck.  Well after we vacuumed up as much as we could we proceded to take the rest of the light apart.  We took off the fire safety plates only to find that there in fact had been a fire in the light!!! (No wonder it wasn't working.)

So we continued to work on changing out the ballast to find that most likely the fire had been caused by that dang mouse that chewed through some of the wires.  That dirty son of a gun.  We were getting all the wires in order to get the new part up there and were in the process of getting the dangerous wires in place when my dad's finger brushes past a live wire!!!!! The black on, black because it "means" death. (And no, we hadn't turned off the breaker.) My dad says, "Wow! That didn't shock me... Interesting." Right then the black wire swung away from his hand and headed directly to it's counter part... you know the one...  That red wire that the black one should never touch.  ...Yeah, well. It swung straight into the red wire and instantly my dad and I are in our own private 4th of July firework show in the basement.  And when I say in the firework show I mean it.  Sparks were flying all around us. I start smelling singed hair, (though my dad denies smelling that.)  Then whole thing is accentuated by the dark background, since we've now tripped the breaker, and we stand back in the dark, to watch the rest of the sparks hit the floor.  I had once again ditched my dad, left him standing on that chair as I fled. Sorry dad, I really do love you. But why do two of us have to go down?

Deep breath.  We made it through that project only to start on another which involved a table saw, a small piece of wood, and a bloody chin.   But hey.  My mom always says Misery + Time = Humor.