A First Attempt

Christmas may have come to Whoville without boxes, ribbons, or tags, but at FAR Manor they are all standard equipment. The Boy happened to be around, and Mrs. Fetched recruited him to crawl under the stairs and eject the Christmas stuff. We had to throw back a box of Hallowe'en decorations that he sent out, but he did throw out my reindeer antlers. Daughter Dearest and I had a great time last year, wearing those around the Home Despot and passing them back & forth.

After the ejection was finished, Mrs. Fetched poked through all the boxes to see what there was to see, and then stacked them all up as you see here. It's a marvel to me how we can put up that much stuff every year, but we (as in, “I”) manage.

So with the living room full of the not-so-spiritual end of Christmas, Mrs. Fetched went off to the chicken houses. After poking around the net for a little while, I thought it would be a nice gesture (and the beginning of cleaning up the living room) to get the tree up and throw some stuff on it. Wonder of wonders, the tree was all in one tub and all the pieces were there. (We bought a fake tree like 20 years ago, and have used it ever since. Why kill a perfectly good CO₂ scrubber?) I only had to swap one row of branches, at the very beginning, to get it right.

With the tree up, I grabbed the light strings and plugged them in to see what we had. Out of seven strings, only two lit up completely. Several others had sections out, and a couple more were completely dead. Meh. I took the two completely working strings and went to work. Unfortunately, one was a really dense string and the other was not so dense. Can’t be helped, so I went ahead and rummaged around in the boxes of ornaments until I found my ornaments; I hung that box up. I knew that Mrs. Fetched would want to clean it off and start over, and I’m rarely (if ever) wrong about that, but figured I’d done my bit.

My ornaments, you say?

I don’t remember who gave this to me, or when, but I think it’s cute. The computer itself looks like an old Commodore PET (minus the embedded cassette drive), which I fondly remember from college.

I suppose if I was hard-up for ornaments, I’d grab a handful of old computer parts out of the studio. An original ADB mouse, a 3.5" floppy, maybe some components or cards… Merry Geekmas? But who am I kidding? We have hundreds of ornaments… and they all go on the tree.





Here’s my personal favorite ornament. This is the only reason I’m glad Daughter Dearest isn’t at home right now… she keeps taking it off the tree. And I keep putting it on. And she keeps taking it off.

Of course, Mrs. Fetched took it off this evening. But she took them all off. I’ll put it back on later.

“We need another string of lights,” she said. Little did she realize that we didn’t have any… or none that were completely working. I shrugged and watched her waste her time. If I’m not mistaken, two hours later she’s still wasting her time trying to get a string working. It was our week to vacuum the church, so I volunteered to take care of it so she could either rest or work on the tree as she pleased. Of course, we needed milk and eggs, and I needed beer (and rum, she used it all up last weekend), so I ran into town first. Once in a great while, things work out the way you want them to.

That’s Christmas at FAR Manor — the usual chaos with pretty lights.