So James took my car off to work, and I slept as late as I could, since the first thing I had to do this morning was have blood taken after my checkup. I got dressed, drove to Kaiser, visited the vampires, ate the fiber bar I had in my pocket, and headed for the mechanic. They gave me a ride back to the house and I finally got to have breakfast.

I thought I would finish cleaning downstairs—everything had to be moved out of the way for James to bring the tree upstairs and there were "needles" everywhere—before I started any work on the Christmas tree, so that's what I did. After fighting a ten minute battle against static electricity—nothing I was sweeping would go in the dustpan properly; instead it arranged itself in magnetic patterns along the floor—I just pushed everything away from the baseboard and vacuumed the hall instead. Then everything went back where it belonged, I vacuumed the runner, and then the laundry room.

Vacuumed the foyer, too, and the stupid vacuum cleaner made streaks on the Pergo.

And I vacuumed Those Damn Stairs.

By the time I got to the tree it was way after one o'clock. Okay, can't tell the tree lights without a scorecard. There were four strings: the two miniature light strings that I fell in love with because they have all six colors, even if the orange is a bit cantaloupe colored. Then there was a string we got when we bought the tree, white bulbs with rounded color covers. We had two of them, but one burnt out last year, so I replaced it with a string of GE crystal lights.

Now, all these lights were working when we put the tree away last January. But when I plugged it in, the one with the round covers was completely off, and half of one of the miniatures string was off. I took off some of the covers on the first string, and the light bulbs were all blackened. Dang it, same thing that happened to the other string. I took the miniatures string off the tree. James said there was another crystal light set in the garage. So I strung those two together on the bottom of the tree, and was going to put the other miniatures string on the top. But first I would replace the few burned out bulbs in the string.

I replaced two bulbs and then half of that string died. I could not revive it. Damn, damn, damn, damn.

Having no way to get to the store to buy another string of lights, I was stuck. So I dubbed off a couple of episodes of Castle and cooked turkey for dinner. We ate this quickly, then went out, intending to go to Lowes, but stopped at Home Depot first—and they had another set of the GE crystal lights!

And then it took us over an hour just to get them even and fasten them to the tree. Despite all our efforts there are more lights at the bottom than at the top. Sigh. I love Christmas trees. I hate putting lights on Christmas trees. Surely one of the nine rings of hell includes putting lights on the Christmas tree.

Labels: chores, Christmas, decorating, shopping

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 5:20:00 PM

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