Except I had to fuss over the lights. Again. Last year the Lightkeeper Pro gadget saved my bacon. I had one half of the middle section of the tree lights out and about three pulls on the Pro reconnected the circuits. This year, no dice. I tried the other method, which is something like using a stud finder for the Pro to find where the broken circuit is, but nothing would revive the string. I even tried replacing all the burned out bulbs, until I ran out of replacement bulbs and that didn't work. Almost every bulb in the string must be burned out; no wonder it won't light.So, this meant I had to do something about it after Christmas, and dutifully I bought several sets of replacement bulbs, some from Walmart, some from Amazon, and, when I put away all the other Christmas things, I left the blacked-out section of the tree out in a corner of the library. I also left the library tree there because it had a big section of lights out as well—I'd been swapping lighted bulbs from the "back" of the tree to replace burned out lights at the front for several years now. I should have heeded the admonition on the Lightkeeper Pro instructions, which told me that every bulb that burned out reduced the light string's efficiency, and too many bulbs out led to whole strings burning out.
Now I did have extra strings of fifty lights that I bought for the miniatures tree. I had to finagle it, using the extension cord I use for the star at the top of the tree, which is dropped down the trunk. I fastened the string in place and, well, it worked: the middle of the tree doesn't have a dark spot.
There it sat, and every four weeks in my planner journal was the reminder: fix the Christmas lights. Sometimes it appeared on one of the weekly pages: fix the Christmas lights. As summer wended its way into fall, the reminders I gave myself were insistent: fix the Christmas lights. And there was always an excuse. Until October 3, it was too hot. Back in January and February, it was too cold. Or today I had to...
So there it was, right after Thanksgiving, and had I fixed the lights?
You bet my best procrastinator's trophy with the diamond embellishments on it I hadn't. Somewhere up there I saw my mother looking down at me with "that look" and her hands on her hips.
So I girded my loins and December 2 (!!!) I marched back down into the library to start the job, to be flummoxed first thing. Since so many lights were burned out, and since those branches of the tree wouldn't light up again until a certain number of bulbs had been replaced—I found out later there had to be less than eight burnt out lights in each particular string—how would I keep track of what I fixed and what I didn't? I cursed the socket of the overhead light, which is nonfunctional since a light bulb broke inside it several years ago; we even tried turning the current off and prying the metal parts of the bulb out of the socket with a pliers, but it just broke into tiny pieces. We have three bright lights down there that make it easy to find the books, but not for detail work like that. I had to bring a flashlight to see which bulbs had the burnt-out marks (and you couldn't see them in the blue and green bulbs), and to keep track of which branches were finished I found bright orange embroidery thread.
So on each of the branches that were out, I had to count how many bulbs were on that particular branch and what color they were. The lower set of four branches had seven lights, with two repeating colors, the upper set only six lights, with one repeating color. One at a time I pulled the bulbs, determined which color it was, in the case of the blues and the greens tested them to see if they were burnt out (the big black mark in the middle of the lighter colored bulbs was a dead—no pun intended—giveaway) on the Lightkeeper Pro bulb testing gadget, and replaced them with one of the same color. When I finished replacing all the bulbs, I tied a short length of the bright orange floss around the branch, to indicate it was complete.
While I was down there I listened to a podcast I had found, "Can't Wait for Christmas," done by comedian Tim Babb. This is a goofy podcast, but I enjoyed it and it really killed the three hours I spent down there. Tim's podcast features "Five Golden Things" (five notable things to do with Christmas), a feature about some aspect to do with Christmas, an ongoing contest about which version of a certain Christmas carol is the best, and other odd things.
And, of course, at the end of three hours, I was done!
Well, not exactly. Because even though I had bought what seemed like a lot of Christmas bulbs, some from Lowe's at the end of 2018, and some that I'd ordered on Amazon in January of 2019. I was out of bulbs for several colors and not finished replacing them yet.
All together now: Arrrrrrrgh!
Tossed on some clothes and went to Lowe's. They had no multicolor packets, so I got five of each individual color. It still wasn't enough, so I went to Walmart and found a different brand of replacement bulbs; got as many multicolors as I could and then some extra clear bulbs. The project continued next day, and it was a great moment when I got to the last few bulbs and the rest of the Christmas tree lit up! At that point it was only a few more minutes before the rest were replaced and the tree was fully lit.
Well, almost. There were still a half dozen bulbs that had to be replaced elsewhere on the tree, but that was done quickly.
I discovered an interesting thing: the two different brands, GE from Lowe's and Lightkeeper Pro bulbs from Walmart, actually had two different colors for blue and yellow. The GE blue was a light blue and their yellow was more an amber color. The Lightkeeper bulbs had a dark velvety blue and a bright clear yellow. So when I got on to replacing the bulbs on the library tree (a less strenuous task), I found myself swapping out lemon yellow bulbs so they alternated with amber, and the sky blue so it alternated with the dark. Since I completely ran out of pink/purple bulbs by the time I was halfway through, the library tree ended up dotted with a few clear white bulbs, one that I made sure would be over the Nativity ornament, and another that would go behind the bookstore ornament to best show it off.
I used up all but about eighteen of the newer batch of bulbs, and it was a good thing I had gone out on December second, because by Friday all the replacement bulbs were gone from Lowe's and only a few remained at Walmart. By waiting so long I had just squeaked by.
In the end it was a long tedious process. But the Christmas tree, indeed both the big tree and the library tree, looked lovely, and checking them out every day quite made up for being crouched up on the footrest in the library, shining a flashlight into bulbs to see if they were green or blue.
But never, never again.
[Later: I went out and bought all the replacement bulbs I could find after Christmas.]
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