Decoration Day

Yay. My new house is about 95% decorated for Christmas. Both sides. No pictures yet, but coming soon.

I was operating under two major constraints:

1. No electrical decorations on the outside of the house. This is mainly because there are no electrical outlets on the outside of the house. My mom says they used to wire the decorations through the socket of one of the porch lights. I'm not about to do that. Electrical outlets are on the list of things I'd like my electrician to do for me, although the #1 thing on that list is get back to me with an estimate, dammit.

2. No electricity on the "storage" side of the house. When the tenants moved out my aunt decided to turn off the utilities. As far as electricity goes, this turned out to be a bad idea - getting the electricity turned back on will cost about as much as it would have cost to keep the electricity on with minimal usage for about two years. Thank goodness for battery-operated candles on timers.

I think the house looks real nice. I've worked creatively around these constraints - you'll see, whenever I get the pictures taken.

A note for people who haven't bought their Christmas lights yet: I chose to use LED lights on the tree on the side of my house that has electricity because of their vastly reduced power consumption and their very low heat output (less likely to burn the house down.) My tree has two strands of colored lights (60 lights on a strand) and one strand of white lights. The white lights are now unplugged. Their light is just too damned intense, and has the blue-white color typical of, say, welding torches or those super bright headlights that people install on their cars just to be jerks and blind everyone else on the road. So: colored LED lights are great. Avoid white LED lights until they come in a slightly yellower version that is closer to incandescent light.

Now, to get started on my mom's house...