totient | bragging rights

Long time readers of this blog will know that I live in that house. We're the reason why, for a few years, the Somerville Arts Council had one trolley on the Illuminations Tour visit West Somerville instead of staying on the East side of town.

We haven't been getting as much press attention since the Arts Council went back to a single trolley route. But I saw that a shot Ron Newman took of last year's display is the preview image for the Wicked Local Somerville article on this year's "deconstructed" Illuminations Tour.

Last year wasn't the biggest or best or brightest display we've ever done, but it was pretty decent looking. We had a couple of new critters and refreshed the rope light on the palm trees but there were a couple of older critters we didn't finish relamping, and a parrot that we've kind of given up on, and some things that didn't fit thematically. Those all wound up staying in the basement. And some of the critters that did go out took some squirrel damage while they were out there. If we were going to get more traffic, I wanted to fix up four or five sculptures and a few non-sculptural elements for maximum effect. And I wasn't available at all on the weekend of the 5th, so it was really going to come down to the wire on the December 12 announcement of the Tour map.

So, I took Friday off work and it was a gorgeous day for putting out lights. I got the working sculptures up by nightfall, and fixed up the rainbow, and put up the garlands and the chili peppers. Then that evening I relamped the little fox and one of the llamas whose plug got chewed off by a squirrel, and put them out to bring us up to all of the lights we had up last year. Besides saving power with LEDs and utilizing a brand of lights that we know from experience are less prone to squirrel damage, relamping lets us switch away from Edison plugs to waterproof biaxial screw connectors. Over the summer I picked up a bunch of biaxial extension cords and a couple more splitters and it turned out to be pretty much just what I needed to circuit all of the minis.

That left two big sculptures to relamp. We had a nice big cactus with a mix of nice LEDs and some random green incandescents that we'd sort of stuffed into it when its original string failed. It was suffering some structurally, but on Saturday afternoon I was able to take it apart, straighten it out, remove the crazy quilt of light strands, and tuck 150 colored LEDs into its skin. I got it out before nightfall and it looks nicer now than it ever has before. Then while people were ooh-ing and aah-ing at the display, I got to work on the giraffe.

Most cheap sculptures have some kind of armature, a strand of very cheap incandescent minis with wire lengths customized for the sculpture in question, and some kind of skin to diffuse and slightly color the light from the minis. The wire and the plastic of the bulbs are typically in a color suitable to the sculpture, but the glass of the bulbs is almost always clear. Usually the bulbs have a little clip on them for attaching them to the armature or occasionally directly to the skin. This sculpture, though, had little zip ties holding every single bulb onto the armature under the skin. You had to peel the skin back to get the zip ties off and

miss_chance had spent hours last year getting maybe half of these zip ties removed so she could relamp the giraffe's legs, but ran out of available time and we gave up on getting the giraffe out last year. I spent much of the evening getting the rest of the zip ties off. Fortunately for me the legs were the hardest part, but it still took a while. She also glued its eyes back on when I was done.

Around that time I did a search and discovered that it wasn't just Wicked Local Somerville that was using Ron Newman's picture of our house. Time Out Boston had a list of the eight "best Boston Christmas lights" and number one had a picture of my house on it. OK! That explains the steady stream of admirers. Good thing we got the giraffe out, even if the first night's worth of viewers missed it.

Maybe later this week I will fix up that parrot after all, and put some of the non-thematic things up on our new back fence for the benefit of folks on the bike path.

(icon is a pic I took many years ago of one of the other entries in Time Out Boston's top eight)