Paradigm Farms Horse Retirement: Blinking Lights and a Code Red

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Blinking Lights and a Code Red

I feel like Jason and I should have some kind of infamy at this point due to all of the trouble we have with Christmas decorations. I recently posted about the continuing saga of the deer family. For any who are wondering I am still strongly considering getting Cousin Eddie his RV. I just don't know that we need any more problems from decor. This is us, and it won't be as simple as take the RV out of the box, plug it in, and watch it light up.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving we decided it was time to put the lights on the outside of the house and put our tree up. We only put up a couple of strands of icicle lights on the porch roof. We can barely get those up and get them to work properly every year so my dreams of decking all of our rooflines in lights are dead and not to be revived. I'm sure everyone remembers the god damn cheap ass lights that gave us the finger a few years ago. As always, we tested our strands of lights before putting them up and one of them had a long dark section. Thankfully, because we occasionally learn from past experiences, we had an emergency strand of lights on hand. We must have had bonus christmas decor karma points banked because the emergency strand even worked.

Jason then had a melt down when he couldn't find the Home Depot bag with the clips for the lights. He looked in the car, the truck, the garage, our house, and finally listened to me as I pointed at the Home Depot bag he had strategically placed on the porch. Next, Jason decided it would be smart to spread the lights across the steps of the porch as we finalized light hanging preparations. I did not realize this and turned to go down the steps, and had to make a mid-air emergency maneuver to avoid the lights. I still managed to step on one tiny bulb. Amazingly, we even had some spare bulbs for the lights! Jason put in a replacement bulb, I lifted him up in the tractor bucket, and we put the lights on the porch.

It didn't take long to put the lights up since we only hang a couple of strands. It seemed that victor was finally ours as I lowered the tractor bucket and Jason plugged in the lights. For the first moment it seemed like all was well. Then a small section of the lights, which coincided with the location of the replaced bulb, started blinking. We now have about a foot long section of the lights that blink. I feel this section is complemented nicely by the fact that parts of the head and neck on my deer and Jason's deer do not light up. At least Carter and Cousin Eddie still shine brightly.

our outdoor Christmas decorations in all of their dysfunctional glory

this picture is for anyone who needs a primer on our dysfunctional Christmas decor

With the outside lights done, it was time to move inside and put up the Christmas tree. Just as with the lights, we've had our share of issues with our tree as well. The most notable issue would be the year one of the cats managed to take down our Christmas tree and break the tree and the stand in half, not to mention the ornaments. However, the last couple of years have been problem free with the tree so I wasn't expecting issues. I put on some Christmas music to make sure we were appreciated the festive occasion and then we got to work. As Jason and I were making trips up and down the stairs with the tree and boxes of ornaments, Carter started yelling, "Mom, code red! MOOOOOM, we have a code red!!" Since I have never heard Carter use this term before I had no idea what this was about. I rushed down the steps and looked where Carter was pointing and saw that the dog had puked up what appeared to be intact deer entrails on the rug. This led to a derailment as we cleaned up the intact deer entrails off the rug. Once the living room was free of deer parts we carried on with putting up and decorating our tree.

We now have a semi-functioning deer family joined by Cousin Eddie, lights on the porch roof with a blinking section, and a decorated tree in a room clean of puked up deer entrails. Tis the season.

Missy and Dolly