Oddballs of the neighborhood
Today was a half-day at work, only 4 hours. This meant I left work before I was super-stressed and, trust me, if I could afford to only work part-time then I would since it's a great way to survive this crazy job. Some jobs just shouldn't be done 40 hours a week (at least by me) and this is one of them. But enough about work. The original plans for this afternoon were to replace our outdoor lights which are technically "Christmas lights", but we keep them up and on year 'round. We've got one string with a short in it so they haven't been on at all for a few months while we waited for the stores to get their Christmas stocks out on the shelves and put them on sale. I swear they make these strings of lights crappier every year because they used to last two years or more and they don't even make a it whole year now. The swap was originally scheduled for the weekend after Thanksgiving, but it rained the whole time. We rescheduled for today and guess what? Yep, it's raining again. It's kind of funny since the rest of the neighborhood houses are festooned with lights and ours is dark. This is the complete opposite of how it is the rest of the year when our house is the only one with lights. If I didn't miss the lights so much, I'd leave them off until the rest of the folks took theirs down just to further cement our reputation for being unconventional. But I do miss them - having lights across the front porch and carport of our house is a tradition we started soon after as I moved in and living here is just not as fun without them. And I have come to believe that is it the little things that make you smile which add up to create overall happiness so I want to get this one back ASAP.