‘Tis the season, as they say.
June was in a decorating mood today. so I retrieved the Christmas tree from the basement and set it up in the family room for her. The tree itself went together pretty easily, and since it is a pre-lit tree, all I had to do is whack it together, plug it in and throw the switch. Cool — we have lights! And feeling good about this, I stepped back to shoot my photo-of-the-day to mark the accomplishment. But then I looked closer. Hmmm…this branch is actually out. Oh, and so is this one. And these others too. Dang! But not to worry. This happened last year too, and I isolated it to a wonky bulb that, after a bit of fiddling, produced the full light show. And not only that, but I wrapped the offending bulb with blue tape so that I could easily find it again. Oh yes — up here for thinking, right? I found the light with the blue tape and confidently wiggled it. And wiggled it. And wiggled it some more. Okay, clearly t’s not going to be that easy this year. Time to break out the heavy machinery. And by that I mean the device we bought at Walgreens a few years ago that will shunt Christmas lights to get them working again. It’s worked previously on other strings of lights, but alas no joy this time. No matter. The device also has the ability to detect current going to the lights — I just need to pass it over the lights to work out where the outage is, change the bulbs and we’ll be in business. Fast forward a few hours. I’ve swapped out about 20 bulbs, replaced 4 plug fuses, been immersed in the web trying to find a solution, and still the @#$%^& lights won’t come on. (Where’s my electrician brother when you need him?) So on to Plan B. I spun the tree around to where the darkest parts of the tree are towards the back, and June strung some extra lights on the tree to cover the rest. Necessity is the mother of invention, right?