Dual Strings of Complementary Failures

It's a rite of passing.  Every year, millions of homeowners go out and decorate their property with all nature of lights and decorations.  I am one such homeowner.

It starts with a string of twinkles in a bush or two and sometimes ends up with computer controlled light shows capable of signaling inhabitants of other planets.  Although I salute the engineering involved, I don't have the time, will or electricity budget to put together one of these shows.  No, a simple roofline outline is adequate.

The escapade begins with retrieving the box of lights from the basement.  The family room floor is cleared of any other debris I've left there so I can spread the lights out in front of the TV, which provides the required background football game.  Due to a character defect, I root for the Buffalo Bills, and as usual, this late in the season they are out of contention.  Thus my full attention can be paid to the task at hand instead of the poorly attended blacked-out home game I'm not seeing.

Thought that all the ones used last year would work.
That was not the case.

Next is the testing phase.  Even though the strings of icicle lights I use are the product of fine Chinese engineering, they sometimes don't perform as I might like.  While individual bulb failures don't render the entire string incapacitated, wimpy connections darken entire sections of the strings.  Sometimes a vigorous shaking will let there be light.  What kind of wire do they make in China?

Testing...1...2...

So I test every string before it goes up the ladder.  In particular, the testing determines the strings least likely to fail so that I can string them on the highest peak.   If a mid-blizzard emergency re-illumination mission is required, at least it will be somewhere I can reach with the stepladder.

At least 90 feet high.

The ladder out of the garage and in place, the strings go up to be accepted by the waiting hooks installed years ago.  The extension cord is plugged in and the lights are attached as they go up to double-check their workings.  Hook a few feet of icicle lights, move the ladder, hook a few more.  Then on to the high peak.

Skies not blue.

After years of research, I've determined that the best and safest way to string the lights on the highest peak is to clamber onto the roof and string therm from above.  It's really not very dangerous as long as one's balance doesn't fail, and the shingles are not ice-slicked.  Or if it's really windy.  Or raining like hell.

It was a warm day, but damp.  No rain, just a bit damp.  Until I was on the roof.  Then, of course, well, not exactly like hell, but approaching heck.  But I was already there, and stringing the lights would only take a few minutes, so I moved slowly and deliberately to avoid hard landings.  After a quick survey of the previous month's successful gutter maintenance, I returned to the ground.  Slowly.

The tricky corner.

High Tech
Labor saving device.

After a quick lunch break to let the rain break, it was time to tackle the tricky corner.  The house is a Cape Cod, so one roofline passes over another.  It's difficult to get a ladder into position without a weighty assistant for ballast on the ladder placed at a lower angle than most light-stringing monkeys prefer.  But this year, due to the miracles of modern science, I was able to employ a high tech device to extend my reach, allowing placement of the lights from my perch on the too distant ladder.  It's called a stretched tentacle implement carrying kilowatts (or STICK).

With all the arial work without a net completed, the stepladder emerged from the garage for the remaining tasks.  They would have been complete in a flash, except that there were no fully functional strings remaining for the low roofline over the garage.  Remembering previous futile efforts at finding the broken connections, I cursed the entire course of history that had brought these lights to me, and the Boxer Rebellion in particular.  But after re-testing the remaining B-team light strings with little hope, I finally realized that the desired effect could be achieved with dual strings of complementary failures.  In other words, if I could find a string that was dark in a one part but lighted in another, and a second string that worked in the opposite manner, I could put the two up together.   Without close inspection, no one would know the difference.

Dual strings of complementary failures.

No one, of course, except for you.