The plan was to take today off work as an insurance policy incase I’d run into any hiccups, if everything was on schedule I would be able to cancel the PTO. Although I was on schedule and had managed to remove all the hiccups I was still a little nervous because of the USB failure last week and tomorrow had also gotten very filled up with activities with the kids, for the bottle drive and just getting ready to have 50-70 people over. So I decided to keep my day off. As it turns out it was a good move, not from a finishing my build perspective but from a family one. The kids didn’t have school today so we had them in a hockey camp but when we got to the arena WickFest was in full swing and no ice time scheduled for camps. After wandering around for a while we finally had confirmation the camp had been cancelled. Not only did I not have to look after two young boys but they were two unhappy young boys after getting hyped up by their parents all week for this hockey camp. It was now 8:30 and the time I’d planned on dropping off the dog.
So ahead I forged with my plan for the day with two kids in tow, first drop off the dog at the kennel as its too hard to manage the dog with 50+ people coming in and out of the house, plus some of the kids are scared of dogs so she gets a spa weekend. After that it was to the store to pick up some decorative lights to go under my living room window, the little led twigs I use had deteriorated over the years and disintegrated when I tried to put them in the ground. We picked out all the stuff we needed plus some but when we got to the cashier I realized I left my wallet at home. This is something that does not happen to me, it seems like it is going to be one of those days. It was now almost 10 O’clock my day was getting away from me and I needed to cross the city to go home, once we got home the kids were hungry so we decided to go for brunch. Now it was noon and we were hitting the road to do a couple of other chores I’d planned on having done by 10. That’s when my phone rang and I was promptly provided a honey do list. Off to a different side of the city to pick up hockey tickets. After grabbing the tickets the Christmas store is en route between the rink and the bakery we needed to pick up some things from, so a detour through there to see if they have any of the decorations I am looking for. No luck, off to the bakery, back home, entertain the kids till their mom gets home. Its now 3 o’clock and I can get outside to try and finish off my build.
Luckily I was in pretty good shape and didn’t have a lot to do; hook up the garage trees, put in and hook up the singing Santa and try to fix the bad sting on the pixel tree. It has started to snow pretty hard around lunch time so it at least felt a bit Christmas like out there. Hooking up the trees and installing the Santa were pretty easy, then I had to partially disassemble the pixel tree, cut 2 strands, (2 & 5) off the tree to move the bad string to the back. Once I had them re attached a quick test and even the bad string was working? I wasn’t going to question this luck after the day I had. when I was testing I did notice the singing Santa had 1.2 a string burned out. after trying to find the culprit I decided it would be easier to replace the whole string, this was also a good opportunity to upgrade the incandescent with LEDs. One more trip to the store for one more string of lights.
I finally got to the last thing, although not light related it had a big impact, the new Santa’s stable garage door cover. This is a great system and would be really easy to install on most doors but I have a steel door which has an aluminium support beam running across the top which makes the door wider than the clips. I had to loosen off this bean to slide the mounts in behind it and then tighten it back up. This wasn’t a ton of work but made the install a little more complex. I’m super impressed with the quality and the engineering and simplicity of the mounting hardware. The cover went on relatively quickly even with the extra step of loosening the support. When it was on it looked fantastic.
A quick fire up of the show for the light up party to check all the lights are working as expects and I can call this build done.
Hers is the first video I captures of a full sequence while doing my final test
I also wasn’t the only one putting on a lightshow this week, mother nature was giving me some good competition.
Chasin' Rudolph 