I got my contract for the short story I sold to Unidentified Funny Objects, so I think I can talk about that finally. This is the third Hieronymous Glyph story I've sold to UFO. This one is the first story I've sold to them without Carol's input. I wrote the first draft while she was unconscious in the ICU and read it to her when she woke up I think she liked it, but that's the only input I could get from her.

They needed an author bio. Writing a bio for me, instead of for us, was hard. This was the first one of those I've had to write.

Back when Carol and I built this house, we intended to put some task-lighting over a "breakfast nook" that's never been used for breakfast (but sometimes is used as a food-prep area, and has been spillover office since I moved upstairs to keep the animals amused.)

Since we had no idea what we wanted, the builders put in the simple utility fixtures that you'd see in a barn or basement.

I won't call it ugly, but "strictly utilitarian" might fit.

Over the years, I've thought of one idea and another to not have two bare bulbs hanging off the ceiling.

Last week, I decided that one issue was that the bulbs hang too low, and that makes it hard to design an aestheticly pleasing surround for the lights.

So, I trooped off to Home Depot to see what my options were for a shallower fixture or maybe an LED light strip.

I discovered that they make LED fixtures that look a lot like the in-ceiling canister lights. These mount flush to the ceiling.

They don't just make one style of these. There's an entire long row, three shelves high, of different styles. They come with different electric connections, different trim, different color settings (even psychodelic color changing lights), and several more options.

Eventually, as I stared at the array of "What The Hell?", a clerk came by and I explained what I had for fixtures and what I wanted to replace them with.

It turns out I had two choices. Too dim and too bright.

I got two of the bigger, higher-output lights.

Back home, it was pretty easy to get the old unit off the ceiling - two screws and it's detached. Removing the wires was trivial, and the fixture just dropped away from the ceiling.

It dropped away revealing a new kind of junction box. I'm familiar with the standard junction boxes - about 3 inches square and two inches deep. Lots of room for wires and connectors.

This junction box is about 1/2 inch deep - room enough for wires that plug directly into the fixture.

The new fixtures have a cute plastic quick-connect plug & socket thing, wired permanently into the fixture. It also has a dongle with the mating plug that you can attach to standard Romex cable.

After about a half hour of trying to squeeze two wire nuts, a plug/socket widget and (roughly) forty-seven miles of wire into a space the size of a deck of cards, I gave up.

Enter Mr. Wirecutters and Insulation stripper, and the Romex is wire-nutted to a much shorter set of wires from the new fixtures and a cute pair of plug/socket connectors went into my bin of spare electrical parts.

The new fixtures look nice, they sit flush to the ceiling and have a dome that's maybe a half-inch thick.