So, my kitchen is dark.

Well, my kitchen is sometimes dark. After about 20 minutes of being lit, as long as the lights haven’t “gone dark” in the last two hours.

I have these lovely halogen track-lighty lights in the kitchen — they have been noticed by stylish friends and super home-improvement-type guys, so I know I’m not the only one who thinks they’re lovely. Here they are, at the top of the shot!

And here are several of the people who like them. (This is one of my favorite shots from New Year’s Eve. I climbed on a chair to get this photo and was consciously grateful that I was barefoot — I might have been too drunk to have survived climbing on a wooden chair with socks on.)

Unfortunately, several weeks after this shot was taken, the lights pooped out. At first they just wouldn’t come on, and the maintenance guys came up and “replaced the box,” whatever that means. Voila!

That lasted for 20 minutes.

Now, if I have not tried to use the kitchen lights for a while…say, an hour or more…they’ll come on. They will stay on for approximately 20 minutes at a clip. If I am going in and out of the kitchen and I turn the lights off in between, they work properly. If I leave the lights on, they fade out and WILL NOT go back on for at least an hour.

It took a couple of calls to the office to get them to understand this, and finally I just talked to Jorge, the very lovely maintenance man who “replaced the box.” Jorge admitted to me that these relatively new lights (the kitchen was renovated just before I moved in) have been crapping out for everyone. He even mentioned transformer trouble, so I imagine the circuits in the old building just can’t handle the strain of the funky track lighting, or Optimus Prime up in 1201 is late with his rent.

Either way.

Jorge told me they would have to replace the whole fixture with old-fashioned fugly fluorescents with the plastic cover.

Can I just tell you how much I hate those lights? I know they throw lots of light, but there are so many better alternatives. Every single home improvement show gets rid of those lights. Bad feng shui or whatever. Even my TinyPinkBathroom has better lights than those.

So I begged. “Please, Jorge,” I pleaded. “Please don’t put in those lights. There’s enough ugly in the world. Please, isn’t there a prettier option? These busted crapped-out lights are so pretty — why can’t you replace them with something pretty?”

Poor Jorge — I may have whined a little. Whatever it takes. Good lighting is important, damn it, and so is the battle against fugly.

So Jorge, bless his heart, is ordering me an extra set of the track lights in my dining room instead. And those are pretty. (Upper left corner, above the cheese.)

Yes, those will do nicely, I think.