Preparing to Get Into the Spirit

Day 10 of NaBloPoMo! I’m veering from the prompt today and instead I bring you today’s events in putting up Christmas lights.

Halloween is my holiday. I came across battery powered lights in orange, green and purple and had my office cube decked out from the middle of September to Halloween. On Thursday, November 1st, it all came down and now my cube looks so bare. A co-worker and I were talking about the lights and he told me about a micro LED set at Sam’s Club – four 19 foot strands in white or multi-colored, also battery powered.

I’ve always wanted to put up lights around the windows of my house, but hanging them outside with hooks and running power cords seemed too convoluted for my liking. But with these lightweight LED wires I could literally hang them from the inside with Scotch tape. On his next trip to Sam’s, he grabbed one of each for me, white and multi-colored.

So today I set out to do just that. I started with the living room window with the white lights, and then Bill’s downstairs studio, the two front-facing first level windows.  I then made room upstairs for the two windows, our room and my office. When I straightened out the third strand and put the batteries in, no lights. I changed batteries. No lights. OMG. A third set of fresh batteries. Nope.

&%$#@#$@!!!

Now what? Four windows, three light strands working. The very last strand worked, but not this one. So I told Bill, who is able to fix just about anything. He came in from the garage to fiddle with the strand, and I waited before I took down the lights on the first floor windows. I joked that the minute I took them down, to replace them with the multi-colored lights, he’d get them working. He laughed.

A little while later, and the lights are still not working. He went out to the garage to get the multi-tester and a screwdriver. I started taking down the white lights, after asking which ones he preferred anyway. Multi-colored.

While he worked on the white strand, I worked to detangle one of the strands came in. OMG I think one of the definite stresses of the holiday season are hanging lights. I managed breaking one of the wires while trying to detangle it. Bill fixed it. God bless him.

I finished the living room window hanging the multi-colored lights, when, sure enough, he got the white strand working. I knew it. Ha!

Well, now I have white lights to decorate my cube with at work, and the multi-colored ones for home. We finished putting up the remainder of the lights, but the camera didn’t quite capture it, mainly just illuminating the curtains.

So that’s done. They’re turned off now and won’t be on again until November 23rd. One holiday at a time.