![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaAye up.
My visits to write LJ entries seem these days to be occasional, in every sense. But it's Christmas, and I know a couple of you look for me at Christmas, so here we are.
To cover the important traditional points: I'm at my parents' house, we've got the fire in, I've snuggled up the pigs in blankets, Dad and I have pints of beer. More to the point, it is proper brown beer that tastes brown, which is vanishingly hard to find these days. Rockin' Rudolph made by - of all people - Greene King. Who'd have thought it?
Today, we had a delightfully throwback experience: lift tree in from garden*, adorn tree with fairy lights, plug in fairy lights...
Nowt.
Now. If you were born in the 70s, or earlier, this is a very familiar scenario. If you were not, then just know that for some godforsaken reason, fairy lights used to be wired in series instead of parallel, and thus when one bulb blew the whole damned lot went out and you had to test the bulbs one by one until you found the culprit.
Testing the fairy lights was almost certainly your dad's job (because 70s). My dad clearly carries some residual trauma from this, because even though we now have perfectly sensible modern-fangled LED lights that can be relied upon, he had got them down from the attic and tested them in advance.
Which just made him all the more distressed when they did not make with the pretty lights once plugged in. We both stood in vague disbelief in front of the tree for a bit, then tackled the problem in our own separate ways. He departed to the shed to retrieve a beepy device for detecting current, I plugged the fairy lights into a different socket. By the time he returned and began beeping, I'd got the lights glowing nicely.
Except. My fix was proof-of-concept only. No one wanted a wire trailing right across the middle of the room to the other socket. However, he beeped and I gesticulated and we decided to blame the extension lead. You know, the one that goes from the socket behind the telephone table, round the back of the dresser, and to the tree. The one with "TREE" written on it in marker pen because we do like to be organised round here.
Well, that was easy! Dad fetched a different extension lead of the requisite length, and prepared to lift the old one out. Except somehow, the sockety end of it vanished behind the dresser.
And wedged. Right down at the bottom, between the base and the skirting board. We both peered from our respective ends, phone torches jammed up against the wall. Perhaps if we had a pokey stick of some sort?
Dad returned with a thinnish yardstick, and the sort of grabby stick one uses for picking up litter. I came back with a rather more solid walking stick. I had some success nudging the sockety end along, right up until (a) it also wedged behind the dresser, and (b) Dad realised that some sort of interaction was occurring with the other cables down there and one of the big speakers was about to crash to the floor.
Did I mention that the dresser is solid wood, taller than me, and contains a full dinner service, a tea service, pretty much all the cutlery and glasses this house owns, and a bunch of miscellaneous crap? Moving it was way down the priority list, slightly below "burn down house and go to hotel for Christmas".
Around this point, the mother came in, viewed the situation, and promptly left again.
Anyway, despite the general Right Said Fred vibes (Cribbins, not Fairbrass) we managed to unstick the walking stick, unstick the socket from the other side, get the extension lead out, and get the new one in place.
And do you know what? The new one had a plug with a fancy moulded wire that stuck out a good two inches, and meant the telephone table couldn't go back against the wall, and was now positioned so everyone would walk into it every time they came into the room.
So for a while we played a hilarious game of Tetris where we juggled plugs, and sockets, and those cube-like extension thingies, and Dad eventually went to the local hardware shop and came back with yet another extension lead**, and somehow everything is OK now.
All of this, naturally, happened while today's newspaper had been casually left open on the page that described how decorating the tree has great "benefits of reducing stress and boosting your mood".
I mean, to be fair, it did make us laugh quite a lot. And after all that I even put some baubles on it as well.
Other disasters have included the fire refusing to light, and the end of the wand blender repeatedly falling off and getting lost in the soup.
The rest of the day has just been normal Christmas stuff. Wrapping some presents. ChrisC and I finishing off our Exit-the-Game advent calendar (would recommend, but the end-game covered about 70% of the living room in cardboard detritus). Me making all of my family pretend to be narwhals. Threatening to have the mother burned as a witch. Doing washing up while listening to carols from Kings; I was possibly the only person in the country segueing neatly from Adam Lay Ybounden into Lock Up Your Mountain Bikes, but there we are.
I hope whatever you're up to, you're somewhere warm and cosy, and that you're happy to be there.
* The tree is in a pot, it's the same tree we've had for the last few years, it's not dead yet.
** It's OK, he used to be an electrician. He won't be plugging in three toasters and an electric fire or anything.
Also, as usual: I've written some Christmas puzzles. If you'd like them, drop me a line.
My visits to write LJ entries seem these days to be occasional, in every sense. But it's Christmas, and I know a couple of you look for me at Christmas, so here we are.
To cover the important traditional points: I'm at my parents' house, we've got the fire in, I've snuggled up the pigs in blankets, Dad and I have pints of beer. More to the point, it is proper brown beer that tastes brown, which is vanishingly hard to find these days. Rockin' Rudolph made by - of all people - Greene King. Who'd have thought it?
Today, we had a delightfully throwback experience: lift tree in from garden*, adorn tree with fairy lights, plug in fairy lights...
Nowt.
Now. If you were born in the 70s, or earlier, this is a very familiar scenario. If you were not, then just know that for some godforsaken reason, fairy lights used to be wired in series instead of parallel, and thus when one bulb blew the whole damned lot went out and you had to test the bulbs one by one until you found the culprit.
Testing the fairy lights was almost certainly your dad's job (because 70s). My dad clearly carries some residual trauma from this, because even though we now have perfectly sensible modern-fangled LED lights that can be relied upon, he had got them down from the attic and tested them in advance.
Which just made him all the more distressed when they did not make with the pretty lights once plugged in. We both stood in vague disbelief in front of the tree for a bit, then tackled the problem in our own separate ways. He departed to the shed to retrieve a beepy device for detecting current, I plugged the fairy lights into a different socket. By the time he returned and began beeping, I'd got the lights glowing nicely.
Except. My fix was proof-of-concept only. No one wanted a wire trailing right across the middle of the room to the other socket. However, he beeped and I gesticulated and we decided to blame the extension lead. You know, the one that goes from the socket behind the telephone table, round the back of the dresser, and to the tree. The one with "TREE" written on it in marker pen because we do like to be organised round here.
Well, that was easy! Dad fetched a different extension lead of the requisite length, and prepared to lift the old one out. Except somehow, the sockety end of it vanished behind the dresser.
And wedged. Right down at the bottom, between the base and the skirting board. We both peered from our respective ends, phone torches jammed up against the wall. Perhaps if we had a pokey stick of some sort?
Dad returned with a thinnish yardstick, and the sort of grabby stick one uses for picking up litter. I came back with a rather more solid walking stick. I had some success nudging the sockety end along, right up until (a) it also wedged behind the dresser, and (b) Dad realised that some sort of interaction was occurring with the other cables down there and one of the big speakers was about to crash to the floor.
Did I mention that the dresser is solid wood, taller than me, and contains a full dinner service, a tea service, pretty much all the cutlery and glasses this house owns, and a bunch of miscellaneous crap? Moving it was way down the priority list, slightly below "burn down house and go to hotel for Christmas".
Around this point, the mother came in, viewed the situation, and promptly left again.
Anyway, despite the general Right Said Fred vibes (Cribbins, not Fairbrass) we managed to unstick the walking stick, unstick the socket from the other side, get the extension lead out, and get the new one in place.
And do you know what? The new one had a plug with a fancy moulded wire that stuck out a good two inches, and meant the telephone table couldn't go back against the wall, and was now positioned so everyone would walk into it every time they came into the room.
So for a while we played a hilarious game of Tetris where we juggled plugs, and sockets, and those cube-like extension thingies, and Dad eventually went to the local hardware shop and came back with yet another extension lead**, and somehow everything is OK now.
All of this, naturally, happened while today's newspaper had been casually left open on the page that described how decorating the tree has great "benefits of reducing stress and boosting your mood".
I mean, to be fair, it did make us laugh quite a lot. And after all that I even put some baubles on it as well.
Other disasters have included the fire refusing to light, and the end of the wand blender repeatedly falling off and getting lost in the soup.
The rest of the day has just been normal Christmas stuff. Wrapping some presents. ChrisC and I finishing off our Exit-the-Game advent calendar (would recommend, but the end-game covered about 70% of the living room in cardboard detritus). Me making all of my family pretend to be narwhals. Threatening to have the mother burned as a witch. Doing washing up while listening to carols from Kings; I was possibly the only person in the country segueing neatly from Adam Lay Ybounden into Lock Up Your Mountain Bikes, but there we are.
I hope whatever you're up to, you're somewhere warm and cosy, and that you're happy to be there.
* The tree is in a pot, it's the same tree we've had for the last few years, it's not dead yet.
** It's OK, he used to be an electrician. He won't be plugging in three toasters and an electric fire or anything.
Also, as usual: I've written some Christmas puzzles. If you'd like them, drop me a line.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-25 05:19 am (UTC)My brain is torn between 'why' and 'don't even think of going there'...
no subject
Date: 2025-12-25 06:17 pm (UTC)I am also at my parents', but there have been no cetacean impressions as of this point. Maybe later.
Sounds like things are going well, which is good.