A couple of months ago I mentioned that I'd replaced two regular 60 Watt bulbs with two Philips Halogená bulbs, which are guaranteed to last 3000 hours. That was on November 27, 2000.

One of those bulbs died today, nine weeks and five days after they were originally installed. Based on my previous approximation of 65 hours of usage per week, that's approximately 631 hours... which is a long, long way from 3,000 hours. Even if I had left the lights on non-stop since installation, they'd only have seen about 1300 hours of use.

No, this isn't a big deal, but it's frustrating. I'm sick of changing these bulbs in the ceiling fixture!

If I'm lucky, this'll turn out to be a fluke, and the other bulb will last a lot longer.

My brother picked me up yesterday to drive me around a bit while Corinne is in PA with our car (yet another cat show).

As is often the case with us, our conversation quickly turned serious, and we started talking about relationships. At first, we were talking about mutual close friends, and how a bizarre triangle has developed between a few of them, even though none of them are actually involved with each other in anything beyond friendship.

Intro

I wish I could use their names, but I can't as I don't want to hurt anybody.

Quickly, here's the situation: about six years ago person A and person B slowly started becoming involved in a romantic relationship. "Slowly" is a bit of an understatement. Person A has a lot of bad-relationship battle scars (both personal and parental), and person B had no romantic experience whatsoever. It took them almost three years to acknowledge that they were seeing each other exclusively, even though that's how it had been from the very beginning.

Sadly, a few years ago B started making more friends and travelling, and A felt threatened by B's new friends. A became controlling and possessive, and B decided that their relationship was going to be "just friends". Since then, A hasn't been able to move on, and has entered what appears to be a pretty deep depression.

The "triangle" that I mentioned involves person C, a close friend of both A and B. Whenever C tries to spend time with B, A becomes very "passive aggressive", or sometimes just plain aggressive.

Continued...