All the astronaut offices are on the top two floors of one of the newer buildings at JSC. I was up there today for the STS-129 crew’s rendezvous debrief, and outside the conference room was a Christmas tree covered in shiny ornaments and mission patches, which make surprisingly pretty ornaments since they are so colorful. What a cool space tree!
I have really gotten into the holiday spirit since I finally have a house to decorate. (Also, our neighborhood has exploded with lights and decorations to such huge degree that I feel left out without our own!) What I didn’t realize is that decorating is actually quite time-consuming! I have been doing a little bit at a time.
I put up our stockings right after we got back from Thanksgiving. My “real” stocking is still at my parents house, so I just got two cute knit stockings from Target. I was planning to sew our names on somehow, but it seemed much easier to just buy these two pins with our initials. So I did. I even turned on the fire one night and it looked so cozy! (Side note: having a fireplace that turns on via a light switch? Very convenient. Especially since the builder included it by mistake, so it was free. Ha!)
On Friday afternoon, we took off work early since the snow (yes, it snowed in Houston for the second year in a row, though it didn’t stick this time) was making everyone kind of crazy anyway. We only managed to find a single box of shingle/gutter clips to hang our lights, so we’ve had to stretch them out. We also stopped at Lowe’s and picked up a 22-foot combination extension/step ladder. Let me just say: ladders are not cheap! But we need it for far more than just hanging Christmas lights (for instance, changing a light bulb in our high-ceiling kitchen) so it was a good buy.
After the snow, Saturday was cool but beautiful outside. We spent about 3 hours in the afternoon hanging up our icicle lights. This was a slow process as we tried to figure out the best (and safest) way to reach the highest points of our roof. We also had to get the hang of the new ladder, which underwent many transformations between step ladder and extension ladder of various heights. We also made two attempts at climbing onto the roof before deciding it was a little too steep for us to be comfortable. We finally reached the peak by extending the ladder all the way to its full 22 feet. I climbed up while Jose braced me below. The neighborhood looks totally different from 25 feet up! We ran out of lights before we finished the garage, so Jose bought a couple more boxes on Sunday. It’s been raining since then, but hopefully we’ll hang them up tonight.
On Sunday we also went shopping for a Christmas tree in the more usual Houston equivalent of snow….which is to say we went Christmas tree shopping in the rain. I felt silly at first, but there were a lot of people at the garden center also looking for Christmas trees in raincoats and under umbrellas. We found a lovely 6-7 foot tall tree and brought it home, only to find that the tree stand Jose had gotten when he went out to buy the additional lights wasn’t quite big enough.
We left the tree on the back patio to dry off while we went out AGAIN to get a Christmas tree stand. For those keeping score at home, we’ve made at least 4-5 trips to various stores to get Christmas-related items! The good news is that we’ll use it all again next year so we only have to acquire everything once. We got it into the stand, and last night had to readjust to make it straight. Tonight we’ll finally get to decorate it and then — then! — we will be fully decorated!
I’ll post pictures once we finally get all the decorations done. 🙂
