This year has been more than a little crazy, and not just because of the pandemic. For the past couple of years Dave has been working on projects for multiple companies simultaneously. They all start out as little things that promise to be over after a couple of weeks, but somehow manage to last much longer. He's been a machine, coming home from is regular "9-5" and still managing to whip out code for other freelance gigs for another few hours a night. Last year the kids desperately wanted to do the lights, but it just wasn't in the cards with everything we had going on. Dave made a commitment to them that we would do them in 2020 no matter what. And... well... here we are. It's been INSANE. There has been some blood, some sweat, some swearing, and some tears too. Ha. Since labor day if we haven't been at work or helping the kids with school related things, we've probably been working on Christmas Lights.
When in comes to getting lights up on the roof, Dave usually bears that brunt of that part. Particularly this year, as I suffered a knee injury requiring a couple of surgeries, and still haven't regained all of my leg strength back. Hanging C9 bulbs and icicles on our roofline every year just to take them down again a few months later is a literal nightmare; so we decided to make it easier on ourselves in years to come by taking on a hellish project this year. We've installed permanent, individually controlled RGB LED light strips along the roofline of our house. This involved drilling holes at certain locations on our exterior to run copper wire through tight attic and soffit spaces to controllers at two locations in our attics. We have something like 1500' of ws2811 lighting, and we've run nearly 3000' of wire to connect everything. We knew the project would take longer than normal, but we significantly underestimated the length of time (and stress) that would actually be involved. It didn't help that we ran into a few hiccups that put us behind (I'll put those details in the setup notes later for those that care.) Besides the mess of the permanent install we still have the daunting task of editing each of our musical sequences to include the new lighting (and exclude the old), which is also a reasonably time consuming process. So if you come to see our show this year plan on it changing from one day or one week to the next. We've decided its best just to release each song/sequence as it's finished.
Our kids have also been a greater help this year than in the past. It helps that they are older and can be taught to repair lights or set something up and can more or less be left to the task without a lot of hand holding. Dave and I still have the majority of the project on our shoulders, but they are learning the ropes. A particularly big shout out to our 10 year old, Abigail, who willingly crawled around on her belly across 2x4's in the tight areas above our soffit to run wire!! Without her over-zealousness about the project, her positive attitude about climbing up there time and time again, and her flexible little body fitting into all of the tiny spaces, we wouldn't have made it to the point of running our show this year.
We hope you enjoy our show this year, a lot has changed, and we hope you enjoy looking through the images and video on this site to get a glimpse of our insanity.
Merry Christmas!!!!