I realized that, now that I moved out of my apartment and into a proper house, I can get more creative with my Christmas lights this year. But as I looked at other houses in the neighborhood for ideas, I realized that all of the common things you tend to see, like lighted snowmen in the front yard, light "icicles" hanging from the roof, etc., don't really appeal to me at all. Then today I realized that I can take my lighting inspiration from another part of my life.

Since so few of my friends are pilots, I suppose I should explain that it's supposed to be runway lighting. White lights mark the sides of the runway, green is the start of it, red is the end, and blue lights delimit taxiways. I ransacked the internet trying to find a good, clear picture of real runway lights to offer in comparison, but they're surprisingly rare. I guess it's pretty hard to take a good picture at night from a bumpy light plane. Here's the best I could find (originally from this page).

Cat sent me her photos from the Christmas Party where Bryan, Matt, and I played guitar, so I thought I'd post them. She also shot a few short videos, so I put two of those online as well:

• Angels We Have Heard On High (4.3mb X-Vid video)
• Jaeden's Proto-Headbangs (2.4mb X-Vid video)

The people's talking kind of drowns it out, but you can still make out the music. Also, Jaeden is being brought up to be awesome.

Today the organization that Cat works for held a small party at a local church, and she asked Bryan and I to play music while the guests were arriving. Bryan enlisted his far more talented friend, Matt (err, no, wait, this is the picture I meant to link to) to play with us. Matt is about to graduate with a Music degree, so his skills added a lot to the ensemble.

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I bought a Christmas tree last week, and it made me happy; the smell alone was well worth the cost. It's the first tree I've bought while I was living on my own — I never bothered to get one when I was in Clemson. When I got it home, I realized that I now faced another novel task: buying my own ornaments. I suddenly found myself feeling out previously unexamined regions in the world of my likes and dislikes, like the grayed-out unexplored portions of the map in a strategy game. I've never before considered the question, "What kind of Christmas ornaments do I like?" It was never an issue before, of course. In Puerto Rico we just put up my whatever ornaments my parents had accumulated over the years.

I ended up getting mostly ball-type ornaments, because I decided that I didn't really like a tree overloaded with random figurines like drummer boys and angels. But when I got home and put the ornaments on the tree, I realized that it just doesn't look satisfying with nothing but glass balls and garland. So now I know for next year: A Christmas tree needs figurines, just not too many.

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