The only way I knew that I could use a regular bulb in my track lighting was from the picture on the package of the floodlight I bought today. It showed a regular bulb in the fixture, with a caption below that warned me not to use one because light would be "lost." A floodlight would be much better (so says the floodlight manufacturer).

But much more light is lost if there's no bulb at all, and I couldn't for the life of me get the floodlight to fit inside the fixture. There must be a tool for that, but I don't have it. Kitchen tongs don't work, I can tell you that much. The head of the light bulb is almost as large as the opening in the fixture, and the socket is so deeply recessed that you can't reach inside and screw the bulb at the same time. I can't, anyway.

It wasn't for lack of trying. It might be for lack of manual dexterity, which is one of those things (like carrying a tune and being a morning person) that I would change about myself if I could. I can't use tiny tools, and I'm not all that good with big ones. Generally the best policy is to keep me away from any task that requires actual skill. Anything I can't fake, I don't even try to pretend I can do.

I didn't think changing light bulbs fell into that category until I moved into this place. The light in my overhead ceiling fan fixture is out most of the time (including now and for the last six months) because I'm deathly afraid of heights and won't get up on a ladder. I don't like to ask for help all the time, so I do without. It would be nice to have that light work, because it's high enough that it doesn't reflect its glare on the TV screen, but I make do.

And now this. I do use the track lights, because I can direct them wherever I want and they give decent (if not great) ambient lighting for this huge room that I spend most of my time in. Once before I had one of the bulbs burn out, but it was an extra one that didn't seem to have any purpose, so I left it out. This one that burned out yesterday was one I wanted to replace, so I bought a bulb, exactly the same size, at the store this morning.

After an hour of fiddling and fuming (and trying the kitchen tongs, to no avail), I surrendered. I had already read and reread the label on the box, looking for some clue. I read it one more time and realized that if they were telling me not to use a regular bulb, it would probably be okay to use one as long as my expectations were low. The reason they didn't want me to use one wasn't that it wouldn't work. It's that they wanted me to buy their more expensive floodlight.

Well, what doesn't fit is kind of useless, too. So now I have a less than satisfactory solution to my problem, but it's better than no solution at all.

And another thing. Why does the bank make it so hard for me to give them my money? I had to wait forever to get an approval on the check I was trying to deposit this morning. It wasn't that there was a question whether the check was any good, because the teller phoned the other bank right away to verify that. It's just their procedure.

They only have one person at a time who can sign off on big deposits, and that person was on the phone with a customer, forever. Phones. They make my life miserable no matter where I go. It always seems, at least in the banks and stores that I go into, that a person on the phone is more important to the clerk than the customer standing right in front of them with money in his hand.

If I couldn't interrupt a phone call to accept a customer's six-figure check, I think I'd find another way to do business. Maybe they need two managers.