🎄 Christmas 2025

We need Christmas decorations. The most important holiday. Late October is not too soon. How many Christmases do we get in a life? I do not want to think of it.

✨ Lights

I attached standard Christmas string lights to the plant cart, a little haphazardly. It will do. I am not sure I will ever take these down. I used maybe 50 cable ties and it will a little tedious to remove them all. Also, it looks not explicitly Christmasy in the mean time, and the room could use more light, although they seem to exhibit a kind of flickering which I read is due to cheap half-wave rectified LED drivers. 60 Hz flickering.

🌲 Tree

The tree is 3 ft tall unlit tree, ($15 at Hobby Lobby). I cannot trust that built-in LEDs on such disposable trees will survive long, so I outfit the tree with removable fairy lights.

A tree skirt covers the private parts of the tree. Also, battery-powered mini Christmas lights.

🍃 Wreath

Bailey made a wreath a very long time ago and it continues to decay each year. It will be a shame when it is no longer with us because it is beautiful. We hang this on the front door.

🎁 Gifts for Me

Increasing dietary fiber could be a good thing for us, but the process of preparing digestible beans is annoying so I bought us a pressure cooker (Instant Pot® Pro™ 6QT). I made rice and it took 5 minutes. Incredible. Apparently legumes can be finished in something like 30 minutes. Wow.

I can play audio through the monitor, but of course they remind me of being on public transportation. Even these very cheap, small bookshelf speakers (Micca MB42X G2) are way overpowered for PC speakers, but I had a 50 W stereo amplifier (SMSL-SA50) from a very long time ago which can drive them, so I put it to good use.

🎁 Gifts for Thee

Christmas ended up getting CANCELED. Too many illnesses. Now there is a pile of largely empty gift-wrapped boxes arranged merrily in the spare storage bedroom.