Hanukkah notes 2009
In 2007, Wifey and I tried making a Star of David decoration, but it didn’t come out well. For 2008, I let my house be the undecorated one on our street. For 2009, Wifey decided to invite over our little homeschoolers’ group for a party, so SOMETHING had to be done.
So this is what I did (click images to embiggen): I pretended that the ropelight was a neon sign tube, which I wrestled into a star-shape and then covered the non-star parts with black electrical tape. The ropelight has a fairly large minimum curvature, so I curled it into loops at each corner (covered with tape) to create the appearance of a sharper change of direction than a ropelight can actually manage. This is pretty much exactly what xolo suggested in a comment on my 2007 post.
This wooden star-of-David form is the same one that we’ve been using for many years. Previously it was covered in many strands of Christmas lights, with the controls set to “random chasing patterns”. But those lights stopped working during the move to Canada. The yellow blob in the window is a hanukkiah; see the daytime photo below.
Blah blah blah. Need more text because the pictures are too big. Yadda yadda.
At the Hanukkah party, we cobbled together some electronic gizmos to make a Skype videophone for our livingroom; we used it to call a former member of our group who has moved back to the States. They were familiar with Skype but we had not previously used it. The setup for our livingroom was quite easy!
After the typical conference-call greetings, they panned their camera around so we could see how much snow they got; then we pointed our camera out the window to show how little we got (because the jet stream is quite far South right now).
We had a Secret SantaHanukkah Harry gift exchange. It was notable how many people got fellow family members when they pulled a name randomly out of a hat, but perhaps this is related to the birthday paradox.
Maybe I should make the pictures smaller.