Month: January 2019

As I might have mentioned, we took down our annual Christmas decorations on New Year’s Day, and I was very, very careful to go through all the rooms to find the decorations I put out. I actually put one tchotchke in our bedroom, and I got that packed up. I got the one on the end table that was hidden from sight because of the way we turned our sofa to make room for that *$&*@!! Christmas tree. I got the things in the dining room, including a little American folk are Twelve Days of Christmas thing that my mother-in-law gave us as a joke but which we put up every year where she gets to see it all through Christmas dinner.

But, ah, my foes, and ah, my friends, when I looked at the kitchen, I looked from the dining room at the space on the top of the cabinets where we put what few kitchen tchotchkes we have, and there was nothing.

I did not look at the counter.

It’s a little serving set that we got from somewhere that I set out on the counter where it gets in the way of Christmas cooking and baking, but what says Christmas more than something getting in your way when you’re already feeling pressured because of the holidays and you have to get something done and DAMMIT there’s something else?

At any rate, I will get them boxed and stored before I splatter them with eggs and breakfast materials this year, unlike Christmas stragglers in 2012 and 2013.

In 2016, we decided to get a second Christmas tree for our lower level. Because I didn’t like putting on Christmas lights–every time I did, I put a corner of a mantel into my kidneys while winding or unwinding the Christmas lights, I thought we could get a pre-lit or pre-strung Christmas tree for our upstairs–and move the old tree downstairs.

Well, that was very easy. In 2017, when we put up the new pre-strung tree and plugged it in. All we had to do was put the ornaments on. Previously, it had been a two or three day process: Put up the tree, fluff it, string the lights, and decorate it. But the new process was essentially two steps and something we could do willingly in a day.

But that was then. 2018 was now. When we plugged in the tree, several sections of the tree were unlit. I spent an hour or so trying to identify the bulbs that burned out and knocked whole strands out, but ultimately I could not, and resigned myself to stringing additional lights in the dark zone before decorating it.

Then, after we got the ornaments on it, another section went dark. And remained dark because I would have had to fuss with the lights through the ornaments or lay a new strand of lights over the ornaments.

I was in the mood to pitch the thing (or donate it to a charity garage sale and let someone else fuss with it for a couple of dollars), but these lights were not embedded in the tree; they were strung on the tree. So if I took them off the tree, I would still have a tree for next year that I could string lights on. It seemed like a good, economical idea. Especially since I was not going to replace this tree with a prelit tree of any sort next year that I would essentially rent for a trouble- and hassle-free single Christmas.

So after I packed up the Christmas decorations and ornaments yesterday, I started on the lights. It was then that I discovered that:

• Some individual lights were held on with individual clips, which meant I had to pop off the clip on each branch of the tree except
• some lights, generally the ones at each side of a main branch, were zip-tied to the respective branches, so I had to carefully find the camouflaged zip ties and cut them without cutting too much of the branch or fake fronds with them and
• The strings themselves were not individual lines; several times, the wires separated and went to the other side of the tree for some circuit reason that made sense to someone other than myself. So I would come to these Y intersections and cut one section of them, hoping I would find the other end of it eventually.

The total time to remove 600 lights and their clips and zip ties: Four hours.

Which I guess isn’t too bad. 600 lights removed in 4 hours is 150 lights an hour, or 2.5 per minute. But the metrics ultimately don’t make me feel better.

About the time I really, really came to regret the decision is same time I thought I was almost finished. The total elapsed time of really, really regretting my decision and thinking I was almost done itself was about two and a half hours. But once I get onto a task like that, I must finish no matter the cost in sanity or spending my entire day off messing with that tree.

Worst of all, as I was working, I couldn’t help think that somewhere in China, some young woman has to put the lights on these Christmas trees, several a day, or she’ll be fired and have to return to the provinces to eke out a living on a substinence-level farm. The perspective didn’t help.

You know, I read a lot of Buddhist Zen and mindfulness stuff, but I never really got into the zone of it while working on the Christmas tree because I was too busy resenting the task. Which was probably even unnecessary. Clearly, I was hanging too much onto my self and a preference to do something else with that time even if I didn’t know what that was.

Worst of all, it kind of felt like a recap that replayed my 2018: A simple task, expanding to fill all the available time and leaving me having done something without actually feeling a sense of accomplishment for it.

So next year, I will pull the our existing Christmas lights out of storage (not the ones from this tree, which I basically cut off and would never have figured how to get onto the tree again given their strange separations), I will test them before I put them on the tree, and the tree will be lit the old fashioned way: Over the course of days, and with many mantel pokes to my back which I will appreciate as I never have before.

When filling the ice cube trays at Nogglestead, I have two settings:

1. I overfill the trays, triggering a minor ice age in the freezer as the ice cube trays freeze to each other or overflow, producing ice stalactites that hang from the ice cube trays and spill onto frozen foods below, forming structures only a wampa could love.
    
2. I overcorrect for the above problem so that the ice “cubes” are actually tiny little ice “tiles” about an eighth of an inch thick.

One would think with years of practice, I would be able to thread the basketball hoop of filling an ice cube tray properly, but I have not. I believe the word “incorrigible” applies. Perhaps “inveterate,” too.