The Inn Crowd

Every year, our town holds a special "Christmas at the Inns" tour of the local bed & breakfast establishments. There are a lot of cute and historic inns and B&Bs around, and this is a chance for everyone to peek inside without actually renting a room. A ticket costs $20 and covers two nights with about 10 to a dozen inns on the tour. Kathy and I buy tickets every few years, and we always enjoy it. (Here's a YouTube video from the 2011 edition.)

This year, a few of the usual inns couldn't participate for one reason or another. The organizers found themselves a bit short-handed, with only about eight inns on the roster. So they asked us to join the tour.

"But we're not an inn!" Kathy and I replied, predictably and simultaneously.

"Yes, we know, but you've got an historic Victorian, and it's right downtown, and you are a business. We think you'd fit right in."

So we agreed. We'd never been part of the Christmas at the Inns tour, but it sounded like fun and we're happy to help out the town. The local Chamber of Commerce supplies musicians (we got a harp and a cello) and two docents to help shepherd the visitors through the building. All we have to do is stand around and be sociable, and maybe provide some refreshments. We decided to bake little cinnamon cakes and make some spiced cider.

"How many visitors should we expect?" we asked.

"Oh, about 90 to 100 visitors. The tour runs for two nights, and you're on the slower of the two nights. We'll get maybe 200 on the first night, but about half that on your night."

Okay, great. One hundred little cakes it is, then.

We spent the day cleaning house, dusting, putting away valuables, and making cakes and cider. Then at the stroke of 6:00 PM, we opened our front door to find... a line of people all the way out to the sidewalk. It was like Halloween, for grownups. They couldn't squeeze in fast enough. We collected tickets and poured paper cups of cider as fast as we could. Our two volunteer docents did a great job of directing traffic and shepherding folks through the house, but we were absolutely slammed. It was wall-to-wall people. Our 100-person supply of cinnamon cakes was gone in the first 45 minutes, and the cider disappeared shortly after that. If you didn't come in the first hour, you got no treats.

Our own unofficial tally put the headcount at about 500 people. But the city says they sold over 800 tickets, a new record. Of course, not every ticket holder came to our house that night, but we're pretty sure most of them did. I've never seen so many people crammed into the house. It's possible that it's never held that many people all at once in its entire history.

Glad we could join the fun. Sorry about the snacks.

The Dim Bulb

The local hardware stores were all giving away free light bulbs a few years ago. We couldn't walk into the Home Depot without some hourly employee force-feeding us a brand new light bulb or two. They were the compact fluorescent (CFL) kind. You know, the energy-efficient type with the weird spiral glass "bulb." At the time, I assumed this was part of some industry-wide awareness program to encourage us all to convert from our old, inefficient incandescent light bulbs to the new energy-efficient ones. Or maybe it's a government program to get us to switch. Either way, I was a fan. Hey, free light bulbs!

Now I understand why they were handing them out so aggressively. They're terrible.

First, they had fat bases that wouldn't screw in to most lamps or ceiling lights. They just didn't fit. Second, the bulbs were dim. Sure, they saved a lot of energy compared to normal light bulbs but that's because they were only half as bright. Plus, the "color" of the light was funny -- a harsh ultra-white white, instead of the warmer yellowish white we've all grown used to.

But most of all, the bulbs were terrible because they were slow. They actually needed time to warm up, like an old tube radio. You'd flip on the light switch and there was a noticeable delay bfore the light came on. Like the old Muhammad Ali joke, you could turn on the light and be out of bed before the room got bright. And when the light did come on, it started out sort of pale and gradually - really gradually -- got brighter. It took a solid three minutes for the bulb to reach full brightness. No wonder they couldn't sell these turkeys. They were giving them away to avoid dumping them all into a landfill somewhere.

Anyway, through sheer greed we collected dozens of free CFL bulbs before we realized we couldn't actually use them anywhere in the house. Anywhere, that is, except the bathroom.

One of the few places these crappy CFL bulbs would physically fit into a socket was in our 2nd-floor bathroom ceiling. This is the bathroom we remodeled in 2011, so the ceiling fixtures are brand new and -- aha! -- they're compatible with the fat bases on the newfangled CFL bulbs. But that's not the best part.

The best part is, when you're dragging your tired self to the bathroom at 4:00 AM, you don't want to be dazzled with bright lights. You want a nice dim bulb. It's perfect that these ones take so long to warm up. That's exactly the right thing early in the morning. They start out slow and kinda pinkish, and gradually work up to full brightness, by which time I'm nominally awake. It's like having an auto-dimmer built in to the bathroom. And it's free!

So now all the old, weird, crappy (but energy-efficient) CFL bulbs go in a special box designated bathroom lights. I'll even sell you a few if you want.