71,000 Lights

Would you believe 7,100? How about 710? 71? There are prob­a­bly some­where between those last num­bers dec­o­rat­ing this spec­tac­u­lar Christ­mas tree on the back wall of my cubical/office. It is two sec­tions of mesh net lights that go on the shrubs in front of a house. They used to grace our old arti­fi­cial tree, but now that we have a smaller tree they are obso­lete. When I first put them up I just hung them as a big ol’ rec­tan­gle. It looked awful, but I didn’t know what else to do. When my wife showed up for lunch she sug­gested the tree shape by let­ting the top panel hang from a cen­ter point. Smart girl.

We gath­ered some small bits of dis­carded valve parts for dec­o­ra­tions, but more was needed. So I brought in a box from the attic at home that con­tained all my old draft­ing sup­plies from way back in the day — pre-computer. I prob­a­bly have the only tree dec­o­rated with cir­cle & let­ter­ing tem­plates, pen­cils with dif­fer­ent grade leads, tech­ni­cal pens of vary­ing line widths, a com­pass for draw­ing big cir­cles and a pocket pro­tec­tor. Plus there are even some small actual Christ­mas orna­ments on there.

On the way back from check­ing the MMC P.O. Box in North Augusta tonight the Emperor clicked over the 71,000 mile mark.