This past weekend I spent several hours working on our Christmas lights program. As of today, Thanksgiving is only 24 days away, which means I have to be ready to go live with our Christmas lights in 27 days!!! Arg! All of my procrastination is now “paying off” as I scramble to program the music and lights for my new props so that we’re ready to go by Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. Fortunately, most of the songs I did this weekend only needed the new things added, so I didn’t have to program anything from scratch. But I do have 2-3 new songs that I want to program so that the show isn’t a complete repeat from last year, and those take time! So! Much! Time! And the reason it takes so much time now is that I’ve gone from 16 channels two years ago to 72 channels this year (and I have 8 channels to spare for next year). I’ve turned my 8-channel spiral tree into a 24-channel spiral tree this year. I’ve added three arches that each use 8 channels, for another 24 channels. And while I know that this entire paragraph is all gibberish to you, the fact is that it’s a lot of work, and I don’t even have the amount of channels that some of the serious guys have out there, like this:
That’s not me. First of all, my house is on 1/4 an acre, so there’s only so much I can do. I have maybe 8000 lights compared to the house in the video having 100,000s of lights. One thing I DO want to do the in future, when I’ve got money to burn and no bills to pay, is get RGB pixel lights to run around the perimeter of the house edges and roof lines. But those things are expensive and require completely different hardware to program and run the lights, and I don’t have that kind of budget.
But fortunately, because I don’t have any “major” competition in my local area, I am happy to say that people like to come visit out house, and have a good time seeing the display I’ve come up with. Would I ever been on Great Light Fight? No – my house is not enough of a true spectacle for that. But if we had a hometown version? I’d totally enter that contest.
In addition to programming lights, we have EGGNOG in the house. Denis found some a couple of weeks ago and so CootieGirl and I have been very slowly partaking over the past couple of weeks. I’m still sad that my favorite flavor of all time – Sugar Cookie Egg Nog – is no longer available.
And lastly, I was thrilled to put my Tivo to good use this weekend, recording over a dozen Hallmark Christmas movies. And I’ll continue recording them so that I have enough not only to last up until Christmas, but to last for the few weeks post-Christmas when I refuse to believe it’s over for another year.
