What a start to the day (and bonus "What a year!")

( Warning: contains harm to an animal done by another animal )

In other news, everyone is dying this year. Brian Bedford, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Prince, Mohamed Ali, Gene Wilder, Florence Henderson, Anton Yelchin, John Glenn, Alan Thicke, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and now George Michael. I'm sure I've forgotten a bunch. Not to mention Carrie Fisher's massive heart attack, from which no one is sure she'll recover. Though if anyone can give 2016 the finger, it's our General.

Someone on Twitter summed up this year nicely:

So. 2016, a summary:
Death.
Death.
Death.
Brexit.
Death.
Death.
President Trump.
Death.
Death.
Christm...Nope. Death.

— B52 | @saltwateritch (@Bristol52) December 25, 2016

( Uncheerful thoughts about 2017 )

On the plus side, so far Christmas has been kind to me. I've put up a tree, which the cats, weirdly, are ignoring entirely. Clearly, Christmas ornaments just aren't as interesting as live mice. It was a bit of an adventure, as first of all the place I went to no longer had any small trees, so I am now boasting an eight-foot tree, which I had to cut down a bit because my ceilings are not high enough to accommodate eight feet of tree plus a stand. I have a special stand that I bought years ago at Canadian Tire, which balances your tree by itself so that perpetually single people like me can put up a tree on their own. It still works well after all these years, and after being left outside for two years in the rain and the snow (because I'm a careless person, sometimes).

Second, I had trouble with the tree lights. I bought a second strand (because eight foot tree), and wound it first around the tree. I was talking to my mother on the phone, and accidentally unplugged the power supply while I was trying to light the strand. Oops. Then when I got her back on the line I dropped the phone again, so we decided to call it there rather than invite further problems.

That's when I discovered that my first strand had a neutral prong that was bigger than the hot prong (which is how most are made these days), while the new strand had equal sized prongs, which made them incompatible. No worries, I thought, I would simply switch them around and plus the new strand into the old strand instead of vice versa. No dice. The old strand only had half the lights working. Since these are LED strands, I don't think it's a question of one light being burnt out (the way they used to: I have memories of exasperatedly switching out one bulb after the other to determine which was the defective one, and sometimes it was two bulbs and then you were screwed), so I had to go out and get more strands. I got two to be on the safe side, so now I have a very lit tree. No complaints, tbh. I didn't even have to use the extension cord I got.

After that, thank goodness, the rest of the tree decorating went without a hitch. I had to split it over two days, as I was working early in the morning (for those of you who are relatively new to this LJ, I have to get up at 04:00 to get to work on time), so I ended up finishing it on Christmas Eve. I had on the traditional Christmas music CD that my father gave to him (classical choir music, I should specify), and all in all it was a lovely and peaceful experience. Las year and the year before I had no tree. Last year I went to my parents' for Christmas, and the year before I had just moved to Ottawa and the idea of a tree was exhausting. In 2013 I was still with my ex, and we used her fake tree, which I was mostly not allowed to decorate, and we used none of my decorations at all and didn't listen to the music that had been my family tradition when decorating the tree. So 2012 was the last year in which I had my own tree (it was a collaborative effort to decorate it, which was equally as nice as decorating on my own), and I missed being able to do it.

And the finished result:

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

In the meantime, I'm in the midst of prepping for the "Un-Christmas" lunch I mentioned in my last post. I have all the cooking set up, either frozen and waiting to be thawed, or else sitting in the fridge or pantry waiting to be prepped. I have some last-minute fresh ingredients to buy, but apart from that, we're looking good.

Today I'm going to give the house a thorough cleaning (I hope I'll have time for everything I'd like to do, but it should be okay), and will finish Wednesday if I must. I have told myself that if I finish it all today I am allowed to treat myself to Rogue One at the theatres on Wednesday evening. I have two free movies thanks to my Scene card, so it'll be a nice, inexpensive reward, especially if I don't splurge on popcorn or anything else. House cleaning is not my forte, though, so I'll have to see. Maybe if I finish early enough on Wednesday I'll still get my treat, but the plan is to do as much as possible today.

Anyway, this entry got much longer than I was planning, so I shall stop there and pick up in a later post, possibly my 2016 recap post.