Today I met up with Beth for a mission in Brent for Mr R.

Mr R has restricted mobility along his left hand side. As such, he's found it difficult to do some tasks around his home. GoodGym were asked if we could help with this by trimming a large tree for him and, if we had time, by changing some lightbulbs.

On the journey up, Beth suggested that we tackle the lightbulb job first to avoid tracking in mud from the garden. This seemed eminently sensible, and so we cracked on with this after saying hello to Mr R.

It turned out that there were infinite lightbulbs to change 💡💡💡💡💡💡💡😵

The first set to be replaced were three bayonet-fitting bulbs in a chandelier-type light fitting. Aside from a brief moment in which we managed to make four of the bulbs stop working (😅), Beth and I managed to twist them enough ways to make the bulbs catch into the fittings, proving that things will be all light in the end 😎

We then had a load of inset LED lightbulbs to insert/change, along with some retaining clips for holding the lightbulbs to a fitting and some springs to fix the fittings to the ceiling. It all sounds very complicated, and it felt that way as well until we worked out the knack of it (my physics background coming in useful for something while Beth's more practical scientific skills gave her dextrous fingers for actually doing what I wanted to do). In total, we fiddled around with bulbs/clips/fittings in the kitchen, an upper bedroom and a study room.

Finally, we could look at the tree!! Unfortunately, looking was really all that we could do: the lopers we had weren't sharp enough to cut through any branches of the very large tree that we were supposed to trim. We tried to give a smaller tree a bit of a trim with some shears instead (also blunt), but weren't massively effective with the few snips that we did. After talking with Mr R, he agreed that a tree surgeon would probably be a good idea for the very large tree, and he also thought that they would be able to tidy up the smaller tree at the same time.

Happy with a future course of action decided, we made our goodbyes to Mr R, who blessed us for our help as we left.

Great working with you, Beth! Here's to a smooth end to RED January at the end of this week! 🍹😎