Not Grounded

A few weeks ago when I installed a dim­mer in the mas­ter bed­room, I was heart­ened to see that the wall box had a ground wire in it, wait­ing to be hooked up. I hoped that this was a good sign for the rest of the house, which has unground­ed sock­ets. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, tonight when I tried to change a sock­et, there was no ground wire present. That means I’m going to have to have an elec­tri­cian come in and install them through­out the house, in all the sock­ets that don’t have them. Only the kitchen, and the room imme­di­ate­ly off of it have ground­ed plugs, and I’m not even sure if they are tru­ly ground­ed, or just have three holes and no actu­al ground wire inside of them. This is entire­ly pos­si­ble, because even the ancient plugs that are cur­rent­ly scat­tered about were installed incor­rect­ly to my untrained eye. You can screw the out­lets direct­ly into the wall box­es from the out­let itself, but also through some extra screws in the wall box. The old out­let was all bent out of shape because this was­n’t done.

It is inter­est­ing and crazy at times to won­der what peo­ple were think­ing when they did cer­tain half-assed things. I mean, I haven’t done all that I can in the paint­ing of the two rooms I’ve done thus­far, but I haven’t don’t a shit­ty job on any­thing.

Also, near­ly three weeks after get­ting my wis­dom teeth removed, I pulled a shard of bone from one of the upper sock­ets. I’d felt a lit­tle hard nub­bin up there for awhile, but was­n’t able to get it out until today dur­ing the Use Case class I’m tak­ing in Inde­pen­dence, right down the street from my old job.