The utter sadness of it all

This weekend was the ceremonious taking down of the Christmas lights. Yeah, I know I'm supposed to have them taken down by the first of the year, but that time just never presented itself. Between family and friends and weather, it just didn't happen. At least I didn't have them burning since New Year's Day.

I've always found it interesting that taking them down requires a fractional amount of the time it took to put them up. I started putting them on the house the first weekend in November, to the funny looking stares of my neighbors; to be fair though, those stares were more along the lines of "Hunny, let's watch this fool so we can tell his wife what happened." Anyway, the first set of lights for the upper roof took about 2 1/2 hours; the lights for the lower (and much less steep) roof took only an hour; and finally the ground stuff on bushes, tress, and the porch took another couple of hours. All told, maybe 6 hours spread out over three weekends.

In six hours yesterday afternoon I was able to:

• take a two hour nap
• take down the lights
• change the oil on my truck
• have dinner with our Sunday School class

That's almost depressing. I mean think about it. That's two whole hours I could have put towards something else. :D