Lights!!!

On Sunday we also put up on Christmas lights.  Know that this happened at my insistence, since if it was up to Dave we wouldn't have any lights at all.  But when I said that I would just do it myself, he quickly jumped in, since things that I do myself (with the exception of installing room-darkening blinds nearly two years ago) usually go poorly.

Putting up the lights became an adventure in itself since it included my first visit to the roof of our house.  While I would not consider myself to "be afraid of heights," I am also smart enough to not feel comfortable on a rickety wooden ladder that requires me to have to stand on the very top step (marked "DO NOT STAND ON THIS STEP!") and THEN to have to literally hoist myself using mostly sheer momentum.  Dave - who might be part billy-goat when it comes to navigating dangerous cliffs and heights - hopped up with confidence and was probably more afraid of my seemingly impending death than I was.

That being said, I have no pictures of my roof experience - I was definitely not climbing back down just to get a camera.

So, after a few disappointments (i.e. the first string of lights that worked when we tested them on the ground suddenly failed once on the roof) the lights were up, and we sad to see that the string didn't reach along the stretch of the house.  Oh well, we decided that people would just think that we only wanted to light the actual "house" part of the house (instead of including the porch as well.)

Sadly these pictures aren't very good

The pine tree with lights to the right of the house was the original object of our Christmas light affection.  It was so hard to get those lights in that tree that we just leave them in year-round now.  Yep, we're those people.  Each year we run the extension cord and cross our fingers that they'll light.  So far, so good.  In fact, those lights have held up better than the ones we've stored in our garage, which makes me think that maybe we should just leave ALL of our lights outside year round...

The ever-lit pine tree

And finally, a shot of the house from across the street. 

Oddly enough, it doesn't look that impressive in this picture.  But trust me - when you're driving down our dark and twisty tree-line road, our house seems like a beacon of bright light coming out of the fog!!!  As we are literally the only house with lights of any kind and one of the only houses that is directly on the road, we stand out like a light-house.

And while it was quite a bit of work, I love it.