Outside Light
If there is one thing you had better have if you live anywhere other than the city, it is the outside light. If you have never spent any time in the country or rural areas of our country, you may not realize how very dark it can get. It may seem that the world is always lit, at least to some degree, when you live in the city, but this is most definitely not true. When it gets dark outside of an urban area, it gets really dark. So dark, in fact, that you might get hurt if you try to walk around.
I find this to be true when I visit my mother. Most of the time she has the outside light turned on for me if I am visiting after dark, but there have been a few times when she had forgotten. Though I grew up in the country, I now live where there are always streetlights on, and I kind of forgot about the complete darkness of a moonless night. I once got out of my car at her house when she had not turned on the outside light and found myself tripping over everything. I could see a vague outline of things from the lights coming from her windows, but it really didn’t help very much.
One of the best kinds of outside light you can get are motion triggered. These often come with security systems, but you can get them just for light. These will turn on when you drive or walk up to your house, and as long as you are moving about they will stay on until you go inside. These outside lights tend to be very bright, and they will shut off if no one is outside. That saves you money if you are constantly forgetting to shut off our outside light, which was something I always had a problem with.
This type of outside light can scare off someone who may be lurking outside of your house for reasons you may not even want to know about. If their motion sets off the outside light, they will in most cases run off. They think that either someone has turned on the light because they saw them, or that someone is about to come outside. They are also vulnerable to being seen with the outside light on, and they may decide it’s just not worth it.
