I put the lights on the mega-tree today. We now have 17,750 lights up. I still have to get the controllers hooked up and some more sequencing done. I wanted to get the lights up while the weather was warm. 
Happy Thanksgiving!
I did take some pictures of the basement bedrooms, but didn’t have the wide angle lens on the camera so you can’t 
really get a good ‘feel’ of the room. There’s some more work to finish everything up, but we’re getting there. The kids slept in their new rooms for the first time last night. Not bad…we’ve only lived in the house since the end of July!
I put up some more lights yesterday. I think I’m over 11,000 now. There’s a lot of work to do yet – still around 5000 lights to put up. The FM transmitter is coming along. I just need to get it enclosed, put 
together and connect the antenna and give it a try.
The carpet guys came yesterday to put the carpet in the basement bedrooms. It looks pretty nice. There are some finishing touches to do, then the kids should be able to move in. I need to do some more painting, put heat registers and wall plates on and then just some cleaning. We’ll need to set up their beds and put other furniture in. Hopefully the bedrooms will be warm enough. You know how cold the basement can be. I’ll try and get some pictures of the bedrooms up today.
I received test results from the short-term radon test. We’re a little high. Just over 5 pCi/L (pico curies per liter). The EPA threshold to take action to reduce the radon is 4 pCi/L. We have a couple drawbacks: a sump pump basket and transite heating – both holes in the basement floor that radon can easily enter. I’ll have to evaluate my options.
Christmas lights are not progressing very fast. I did work on putting an FM transmitter in a case yesterday. I’ll try to finish it up today. I have 6600 lights coming via FedEx soon. That’s 66 strings of 100 lights/string. That will finish up what I’ll do for this year – enough to finish the mega and mini trees. I also bid on some lights on K-Bid, but only a very low $$ bid. If I get them, great. If not, that’s OK. I should have around 16,500 lights this year. There’s a lot of light sequencing to do. Boy, that takes some time, and some imagination. The software that I use to program and run the lights is called Vixen. It’s pretty cool, but takes some creative talent to make a nice looking light show. I have a lot of stuff to work on if this is going to happen by Christmas.
The ceilings are up in the basement bedrooms. Man, was that a lot of work. Putting the wood up was not the hard part. The hard part was painting and trying to get the seams/joints of the wood to not suck up all the paint and get cracks after it dried. I found out that we were supposed to put caulk in the seams before painting. That would have saved us a lot of time, paint and pain. I had a sore neck for 4 days. When I put the trim up around the edge of the wall/ceiling, the air nailer didn’t have enough oomph to put the nails in all the way, but a few taps on the nail heads with a hammer and phillips screwdriver took care of that. Then I filled in the holes with caulk. Now we have to decide if it’s worth going through all the work of putting caulk in 2 bedrooms worth of over 40 wood seams that are 10-11 feet long. I put a low-profile white ceiling fan in each bedroom. The carpet guy is going to try and make it Thursday.
Another project going on is refinishing a church pew. It’s getting near the end of that project, too. I stripped and sanded the wood, stained it and am now putting a shellac finish on it. If you read the previous post, remember the cats? I need to lock the pee smell into the pew (fitting, isn’t it?) so our us and our cat don’t smell it in the house.
The Christmas lighting project is moving very slow. With the other things going on at the house, it’s not been getting the attention it needs to get done before Christmas. A few nights ago, I saw some flashing lights at a house by Menards when leaving there one night (my second home). I drove over the next day and saw Bob outside working on the lights so I stopped in and talked to him. He was very friendly, as is the general rule in Buffalo vs. Minnetonka. We talked for about 1/2 hour about Christmas lights, work, etc. He is using a box something called the Gemmy Holiday Musical Light Show – not quite what I’m setting up, but a huge advantage he has over me….his lights are mostly up and flashing. Mine are mostly up but not flashing and no sound/music yet, either. Bob also has entered light contests when Buffalo had them. He said he had a 3rd, 2nd and 1st place finish. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by his house and take a look. You can’t miss it – on the highway north of 55 by Menards and the airport. It’s the only house with flashing lights there.
If you have read these boring electrons lately, you’ll know that I’m being pretty superficial – writing about things, stuff, projects, etc. I haven’t been writing about family or personal matters. That’s because things have been pretty bad at home. I won’t go into details and stop right here.
