Working With My Few Dim Bulbs

It started with a flicker.  Lori first noticed that one of the grow lights in the greenhouse was blinking on and off when she went out on Sunday to harvest some lettuce for our dinner with friends.  Since I am accustomed to "operator's error," I assumed I hadn't seated the bulbs securely in the sockets when I hung them.  Never mind that they have been working fine for weeks.  By this time it was evening and our guests had arrived.  There wasn't anything to do about it until morning.  In fact it wasn't until afternoon that I remembered the malfunction and headed out to see what I could do about the strobing.  By this time, of course, it was three bulbs that weren't cooperating.

I twisted the bulbs, I removed and reinserted them; I turned them around and, when that still didn't work, spoke gentle words of encouragement to the intermittent light.  Then words not so gentle.  The bulbs, I concluded, must be burning out.  They are, after all, the same bulbs I used all last seeding season, back when the "greenhouse" was our townhome's living room window.  Not only had their services been significantly called upon, they had since been unceremoniously moved from their basement storage to barn at our new address.  They had a right, I concluded, to be tired.  The following day I purchased replacement bulbs and eagerly accomplished the switch.  No sooner, however, had I turned my back but the blinking resumed, accompanied by the percussive electric start that kept trying to push out of the bulbs some light.

Now, I don't know the first thing about lights.  Well, I don't suppose that's literally true.  I do know the first few things:  I know it takes electricity in some form, and bulbs.  After that, I'm guessing beyond my knowledge.  I recall hearing mention of "ballasts" that our church custodian seemed to be almost constantly changing out, but what they accomplish and how they are replaced I haven't really a clue.  In the meantime it didn't really matter.  Evening, by this time, was yet again approaching, I wasn't going back into town, and the ballasts I wouldn't have known what to do with anyway I didn't have in the second place.  So, I rearranged the planter boxes on a single shelf beneath the one remaining light fixture, left them to their diminished illumination.  Exiting, even the greenhouse itself looked sadly lopsided in its partial darkness. 

Ever since I have been hoping this light problem is only literal and not metaphorical.  I skitter along fairly well in this new undertaking until some problem -- even the most inconsequential -- punctures my thin veneer of knowledge and know-how, revealing just how shallow and fragile are these accumulating assets.  I am already more darkness than light, though every few days or so I strike a match of progress and see the way incrementally more clearly. 

But I can't afford -- in more ways than one -- any of them to burn out.  I need -- and I am speaking at least metaphorically now -- all the light I can get.