Miss Sparkles

Newton's Third Law states that for every action there's a reaction equal in intensity but opposite in direction. Kathy has been upholding that law for a couple of weeks now.

As the guys work outside building scaffolding, sanding, and stripping the house in preparation for painting, Kathy has been toiling inside fixing our chandelier. It's a big thing hanging in the entryway but upon close inspection it's missing some pieces. Some of the crystals are gone, and others are just hung in the wrong place. The more she looked at it, the more work it seemed to need.

Friends would sometimes bring us spare parts or pieces they thought might fit, and that helped. But the thing really needed thorough cleaning and reassembly. So Kathy painstakingly removed all the crystals one by one and laid them out on the dining room table. Not least among her problems was how to reach over the second-floor banister and carefully unscrew all the fiddly little bits.

Our dining room table looked like an exploded diagram of a chandelier. It's a bit like repairing a British sports car: the more you work on it, the more parts you have left over, and there seem to be a lot more than when you started. ("Where does this piece go? Oh, well, it probably wasn't important...")

Kathy found a source for replacement chandelier crystals, and after those arrived in the mail she could start reassembling the thing in earnest, washing each piece, drying them, making the little wire loops, and putting them all back where they belonged (and not necessarily where they were before). It took a couple of weeks, but she finished yesterday afternoon and the thing is much nicer, cleaner, and more sparkly than before. I haven't done all the math, but if 5,000 pieces all get 10% more sparkly, that makes the chandelier 500 times sparklier, right? It sure looks that way.