Christmas decoration, the disaster novel

 So here's how Christmas decorating has gone so far...

After an hour and a half of finding one string of lights, building a cross from 4 old Chewy boxes, duct tape, and copy paper, moving one chair out of the way to reveal approximately half of a dog in hair form affixed to the window sill, and unplugging the main source of light in our living room, I got some fairly crappy pictures of this...

Much like the pictures NASA posts of faraway galaxies, if you overlay the wavelengths you get a neat picture.

Now as for the inside, I discovered the hiding place of six other strings last night. 2 worked (one was white bulbs only) and four only worked for half the string (one side only) or not at all.  After trying to switch bulbs in dead spots ( and accomplishing nothing more than the discovery that, despite all being the same type, none wanted to switch strings), those four were disposed of properly, so as to avoid the annual cursing and swearing Christmas deco party.

This morning, it was go in search of.  With the closest Wal-Mart being eliminated by Laurie the night before, I checked at local Kroger and Dollar General.  Nada zip zero.

Thus, I ordered online.  Hopefully the last thing I need buy for Christmas.

But tonight, the bug struck again, and I thought of a plan for the two strings.  First, if you noticed, I had this sign (a gift from last year) in the window...

So I thought, why not put the white string around it?  Bad news, I had a lot of white light left over.  Good news, now that half doesn't want to light, either.

The neighbors are putting at least as much effort into things...

And since I had had to move our lovely plastic tree out of the way in going this far, I thought, why not hook the remaining lights on it?  (After contenting myself that the ornaments I usually put on it are hopelessly buried, that is.)

Once again nothing was easy- everything in a five-block area wanted to catch and hang onto the string, and the dead half of the white bulbs wanted to be hung on it first, but in the end I won the battle, and even  Little Sylvia (our reindeer) felt more colorful when I was done...

And now, it is 6:30-ish, so it's time for what will pass for dinner, followed by an Eddie Fitz or two...