A nightlight for safety seemed like such a brilliant idea. Perfect, except I failed to visualize the obstacles lurking in the shadows, including the shadows themselves.
D. K. Wall:Considering we went through the pain of moving from one house to another last week, you might think I have bigger topics.
D. K. Wall:The relocation may have only been a few miles, but it makes the eleventh time in our adult lives that we've changed addresses. And that's not counting moves as a kid or for college or between my various summer jobs through those early years. I mean full time, grown up, sign the mortgage, adulting moves.
D. K. Wall:By the way, this month's reader survey asks how many times you've moved. Join in the fun at dkwall.com/survey. It's free, no catch, no sign up required, just an excuse to share your own tales of moving.
D. K. Wall:Perhaps you have a story like mine meeting the Internet installer at the new house last week before we moved.
D. K. Wall:I showed up and waited in an empty house throughout his entire scheduled arrival window, entertained only with the occasional alerts on my phone that he was running behind schedule.
D. K. Wall:After sacrificing an entire afternoon to the gods of waiting around, I was about to surrender when he appeared. Then he took four hours to finish the job, sending me back to my old house at eight o'clock in the evening, dinnerless and defeated.
D. K. Wall:I could tell that story, but he was genuinely apologetic and quite conscientious about his work. Poor guy was simply over scheduled by his own company. So there goes the entertainment value of that story.
D. K. Wall:There was also the discovery that my dryer's three prong plug wouldn't fit our new four prong house, forcing me to replace the cord, a task that takes a competent human being fifteen minutes and took me a solid two hours.
D. K. Wall:As I'm fond of explaining, there is a reason I am a writer. A starving artist has nothing on an even hungrier, decidedly less skilled technician. I'll stick to crafting words, thank you.
D. K. Wall:And, of course, I could mention how many times I place some object in the perfect drawer or cabinet, only not to remember where I'd put it when I needed it. I suspect I will continue doing that for months.
D. K. Wall:But we've all got such horror stories of moving. So instead, let me devote this week's tale to something small, something simple, a humble night-light. Three of them, actually.
D. K. Wall:To understand what went wrong, you first need to know that we built this house. Or more accurately, we hired a contractor to build this house. After all, if installing a dryer plug takes me hours, imagine if I tried to build anything more complex.
D. K. Wall:You might call building a rookie mistake. Except, this is the third time.
D. K. Wall:The first, in fairness, was one of those cookie cutter neighborhoods where you pick from five floor plans and a small buffet of custom choices. A nice way to dip your toe into building, but not the same as making every single decision yourself.
D. K. Wall:This one though, like our second, was the full experience. Hire an architect and plan it from scratch every single detail.
D. K. Wall:During the design phase, the architect asks you to dream up a wish list of every cool feature you can imagine. They do this because they don't actually have to build any of it. As any contractor will tell you, it is far, far easier to draw a thing than to make it real.
D. K. Wall:Now being a person of significant experience, at least in terms of revolutions around the sun, I've grown mindful of designing a home that will still work for senior citizens.
D. K. Wall:Not that I consider myself one, of course. I'm merely planning for some distant hypothetical event way off in the future. Decades, surely.
D. K. Wall:Here's a thing about being chronologically gifted. Sleeping through the night becomes a rare luxury. I wake early.
D. K. Wall:And I should clarify what early means. Sleeping in is beyond 5AM. Those are the well rested, blessed once a month mornings. More often, I'm awake hours before that.
D. K. Wall:One secret I've discovered to a long marriage is learning not to disturb your ever patient partner in life when you rise in the dead of night.
D. K. Wall:And I can report that hopping a one foot while cursing creatively after stubbing a toe in a dresser does not meet this standard. Neither does pitching face first over a sleeping dog who wouldn't dream of moving out of the way of a human blundering through the dark.
D. K. Wall:So to prevent these midnight catastrophes, I wondered aloud to the magical drawing architect whether we could install motion sensor night lights. Not the plug in kind. Real ones. Hardwired. Mounted right into the wall. Cool, huh?
D. K. Wall:The architect sketched it. The contractor scratched his head in wonder. And on one memorable afternoon, the electrician proudly showed me what he had found. Recessed lights with a sensor that switched on the instant it detected movement.
D. K. Wall:In a soft, gentle glow, a person could spot a snoring pooch and step safely around him. I thought they were perfect and greenlighted the night-lights. Three of them placed strategically around the bedroom and into the bathroom.
D. K. Wall:Last week, after a long day of movers and boxes and existential questions about why we own so much stuff, we marveled at the quiet of our new home.
D. K. Wall:No traffic hummed past on a busy road. No streetlights spilled their glow across the yard. No neighbors' floodlights blazed that fit to guide passing aircraft safely home. It was dark. Blissfully, perfectly dark.
D. K. Wall:We collapsed into bed, killed the lights, and let the darkness swallow us whole. I sighed with contentment, closed my eyes, and prepared to drift off to sleep.
D. K. Wall:BAM! An explosion of light. I bolted upright, squinting against the glare, hunting for the culprit. And there, glowing with the fury of three tiny suns, were my night lights.
D. K. Wall:Only then did I grasp the first fatal flaw in my grand plan. When the electrician had demonstrated that cute little light, it had been in the middle of the afternoon. The sun was out. The room was already as bright as, well, the middle of the day.
D. K. Wall:Those same inconsequential little bulbs in a pitch black bedroom felt like being caught amid a prison break, alarms wailing, guards cranking up their searchlights, beams slicing through the night, bloodhounds baying as they tracked our scent.
D. K. Wall:Which brings me to problem number two.
D. K. Wall:Somehow, across all the months I had spent admiring the sheer genius of motion sensor night lights, I had never once considered that anything might move in the room besides the two humans living under our roof.
D. K. Wall:Guess who else lives there? Three furry canines. Three Siberian huskies had just discovered a brand new way to entertain themselves, if entertain means prevent the humans from ever sleeping again.
D. K. Wall:Those same trip hazards I was trying to illuminate turned out not to be as stationary as I imagined.
D. K. Wall:That first trigger came courtesy of 50 pounds of fur circling and circling, obeying some ancient instinct to stomp down tall grass for a cozy nap.
D. K. Wall:Never mind that the grass was a rug, which does not grow one bit more comfortable no matter how many rotations you perform, not that I've ever convinced any of my creatures of that fact.
D. K. Wall:Once he settled, I figured the show was over. I sank back into bed with a sigh and closed my eyes.
D. K. Wall:Seconds later, I again felt the glare burn through my eyelids. I heard the soft chuffs of a dog deep in a dream, chasing rabbits or squirrels or whatever glorious prey darts through a husky's subconscious.
D. K. Wall:Adorable. Would have been even more adorable if his legs hadn't been paddling away.
D. K. Wall:The dream subsided. I have no clue whether the prey escaped or ended in a gruesome manner, but I celebrated the return of darkness.
D. K. Wall:For maybe four seconds because a favorite Sibe sleeping position involves lying flat with all four legs splayed straight up in the air, each paw twitching gently just enough to keep the lights firing.
D. K. Wall:That night, in a carefully controlled scientific experiment, I calculated that three Siberian Huskies move, let me run the numbers here, approximately eleventy-seven bazillion times per night. Every paw flick, tail twitch, or ear wiggle set off the lights.
D. K. Wall:From the street, any curious new neighbor could have looked at the flashing lights in the windows and reasonably concluded that a nightclub had opened next door.
D. K. Wall:The next morning, running on little sleep and a night of what I can only describe as Siberian strobe lighting, we drew up our task list for the day.
D. K. Wall:Number one on my list, disconnect the new night lights. It surely wouldn't take longer than installing a dryer plug, would it?
D. K. Wall:I'll be navigating the dark bedroom the old fashioned way by tripping over a fuzz bucket.