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Friday, November 28, 2003

icicle lights can't beat me!

Today I put up our new icicle lights on the front-facing peak of our roof (even though the neighborhood on the next hilltop over has an excellent view of the back of our house, we don't have a tall ladder OR a death wish so that peak will remain lightless. Sorry guys). I learned a few things (ooh, ANOTHER list! How many lists can I cram into one day?):

• There's a reason that people very irritatingly leave their icicle lights up all year, even though it looks remarkably untidy. This reason is that it would be far easier and more efficient to throw away the icicle lights each year and buy new ones, than to attempt to pack them back up with any semblance of correctness, and get them out again untangled the next year. Perhaps if we could hire the Chinese worker who packed them originally to repack them for us -- but that would be even more cost-inefficient than buying new lights next year. This thought (buying new ones every year, not hiring the Chinese person) has seriously occurred to me. We would build up an enormous store of spare bulbs if we kept the old strings instead of throwing them away.
  
• Related to the above: another possible reason for leaving them up is that perhaps there is the hope that eventually, gravity will cause the little icicle strands to straighten themselves out instead of hanging in very messy-looking (and occasionally gap-creating) zigzags.
  
• It is generally a good idea to check the lights by plugging them into a socket before you spend hours and risk your neck hanging them. Undoubtedly my organized and forward-thinking husband would have remembered this. However, if this thought doesn't occur to you till you're about three minutes from the end of a long light-hanging project, God has a special providence for forgetful individuals which will usually cause everything to turn out OK.
  
• Stepladders lie. Or at least they stretch the truth a bit. When you know enough about a skill or discipline, you know when you can improvise and when you can't. There are some areas where I'm really good at this, like cooking (example: celery seed is not substitutable straight across for celery in a stuffing recipe [hi Toney!]. But you can leave the parsley out of your spaghetti sauce recipe and you won't even notice). However, there are many, many topics and jobs about which I am so clueless that I cling to the letter of the law like a fanatic. Up until today, "THIS IS NOT A STEP" was one of those things. Necessity prevailed, today, however, and I gingerly found out that "THIS IS NOT A STEP", at least on the top level of a folding stepladder, really means, "Don't stand on here unless you absolutely have to. And if you're going to stand here, do make sure that your ladder is extremely stable and that you have a solid structure to hang on to or balance yourself against. Also, no matter how careful you are, if you fall to your death while standing on this surface, your heirs can't sue us." I did NOT fall to my death, I DID successfully get all the icicle lights up, go GIRL POWER!
  

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