Each year the weekend after Thanksgiving, I sense an innate urge to risk life, limb and public humiliation by festooning the exterior of our home with several hundred C9 incandescent lights. [I’m still resisting the whole LED craze– also known as “the Devil’s bulbs.”] My mild-mannered next-door neighbor and I always engage in an unspoken competition to see who can get their Christmas lights up first, but since I have the holiday sleeping habits of an inebriated grizzly bear in mid-hibernation, he consistently wins–after which he undoubtedly enjoys shouting, “Let me know if you need any help up there,” as I cling desperately to the shingles while those little granules clatter in the aluminum rain gutters –portending my likely doom.
A couple of years ago, I actually considered hiring a landscaping company to install my lights for me–and even went so far as to have them come out to give me an estimate.
Once I regained consciousness, and told them I’d have to sell my plasma and the plasma of my descendants to third and fourth generations to pay for it, I decided that hiring out the job would be cheating, anyway.
