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Even though it goes against all my principles to go to see Christmas lights before Thanksgiving (!), we went to the opening of the Kensico Dam Drive-Through Christmas Lights last night. For the opening you get to walk through and they had all sorts of vendors and food trucks 🙂

And of course I had a camera 😉

Most of these were with the amazing Petzval 55mm Jackie got me for Christmas last year- with its slot-in shaped bokeh blades it was just made for it 🙂

Faith being a particularly majestic beastie in the woods this afternoon 🙂

The new strings of lights are all loaded, tested and ready to go 🙂

10 strings of 80 lights each, that’s 800 7w bulbs screwed in by hand and carefully laid out in color order- that’s what you get when you get two slightly OCD people doing it 😉

And it even snowed while we were doing it to get us in the festive spirit!

It was such a lovely, blustery, wet fall day when I took the dogs to the woods this morning that I took advantage of it being my day off and went back there at lunchtime with my A7Cii and my favorite landscape lens, the Auto-Takumar 35mm f/2.3– a lens that is as old as I am but takes such beautiful pictures I almost always reach for it for situations like this 🙂

I mostly wanted to capture the last of the leaves, clinging on for dear life as they were blowing in the wind, but of course I ended up taking lots of arty pics of the doggos as well 😉

The dogs were, of course, very unhappy at being dragged back to the woods a second time in one day!

Everyone always loves the Christmas Tree in the church parking lot, it’s probably the best looking tree in town! But when we took the lights off it in early January we realized that the 30+ year old strings of lights that our electrician made up have seen better days- many of the sockets are broken and the insulation on the wires is starting to crack. We don’t want to set fire to the tree or have anyone get a shock, so we need to replace them.

Unfortunately most of the light strings you find nowadays are LED, but I refuse to put LED lights on our tree- they are so harsh compared to the lovely, soft light you get from our old-school 7W incandescent bulbs. Luckily I found a place where I can buy 500ft rolls of wire with sockets pre-installed every 15″ that will take the same C7 bulbs we have always used. We will have to cut the rolls and make them up into 100ft lengths that can be wired into our existing portable breaker panel for the tree, and we will have to add the bulbs, but they should then last us many years to come.

So June and I spent a happy couple of hours this afternoon testing all the old bulbs and harvesting the ones that still work from the old strings so we can put them on the new wires when they come. Incandescent bulbs are getting pretty hard to find so I want to reuse as many as we can (though I have ordered a bunch more to replace the ones that don’t work). We should end up with 10 strings of lights with 80 bulbs per string- so we have another few hours of screwing bulbs in in our future when everything arrives, but it’ll be worth it 😉