The pineapple express has passed, the tree is up

Monday morning, dark and damp, but not raining.  Top up, of course.  I did manage a top-down drive home from a neighboring college Friday afternoon, coming back from a state meeting (said meeting is also the reason there was no Friday post).  It wasn't exactly blue skies, in fact it was threatening rain, but it worked.  Felt wonderful!  I don't need to tell anyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest that it rained this weekend.  Torrential downpours, flooding rivers, flooding roads, and warmer temps: the infamous "pineapple express" has been here.

A social weekend: we had breakfast with our son, lunch with a good friend, and quiche-over-football (which would be irony except that I don't hold with conventional thinking regarding quiche and men) with a brother-in-law, all good stuff.  I also put up a christmas tree for the first time in a few years.

I'm not a holiday scrooge, but I do dislike shoving the furniture around to make way for a tree that only attracts unwelcome attention from the cat and the smallest of grandkids.  We finally got one of those fake trees that come pre-assembled (more or less) and pre-lit, so setting it up is supposed to be as simple as dropping piece one in the base, sticking piece two on top of piece one, and piece three on top of piece two. Then allow the branches to drop into place, connect the plugs together, and shape the having-recently-been-squashed branches into a more realistic condition.

Here's how it really works: The three pieces do fit together quite easily. By the way, fake trees also shed needles but they are easier to vacuum up later than real pine needles in carpet.  The branches do not, however, fall down readily or naturally.  They have to be manually pushed down into place.  Since they have been smashed together for storage, they are now tightly interlocking, much like velcro would be if you wadded a bunch of it up.  Also, the pre-strung lights have wires, which catch and weave through the smooshed branches and have to be unlooped here and there before you can drop all the branches. About this time, I'm realizing just how many branches there are on a seven foot fake tree.

Then it's time to un-smoosh the individual twigs on each branch and bend them into realistic shape.  If there are a lot of branches on a seven foot tree, there are a lot more twigs on all those branches.  The first tier was patiently and artistically arranged, with careful attention paid to providing each small twig with a natural upward curve.  The second tier was less patiently attended to, but still with some attention to details. By the third tier of branches I was trying to find a technique that would allow me to aggressively shove all the twigs outward in a single gesture.  By the time I got to the bottom layers I was happy if they didn't look like they had been slept on. Then the ornaments, then plugging it in to behold.  It is actually rather pretty, so long as the lighting is dim and the little lights distract from the less-than-artfully arranged branches.

Music this morning was an odd assortment.  Taking nothing from the musicians on this list, only the last two songs would make it onto my songs-I-like list. Proud Mary always makes me think of my buddy Karl, who currently drives long-haul, mostly across the Trans-Canada.  We have spent many hours together playing old tunes on guitars (which he is good at and I am not), and Proud Mary was a regular.  Fun stuff.

• Billy Bragg & Wilco: Joe DiMaggio done it again
• The Beatles: Lady Madonna
• Five for Fighting: One More for Love
• Sigur Rós: Fljótavik
• Creedence Clearwater Revival: Proud Mary