Light Fantasia
I have big ideas for lights... very big ideas. This compulsion to festoon my house with scores of lights is not totally my fault. I inherit this trait honestly from my maternal grandfather, whose yard each year before his death (may he rest in illuminated peace) became more and more distastefully decorated, and more and more resembling a the ill-begotten love child of Clark W. Grizzwald and Pee-Wee Herman.
Fortunately for my family, my neighbors, and my own self-esteem, my dreams are limited by my own physical abilities. My zeal for putting up holiday lights is checked by my threshold for work-effort and in some cases, danger. (Let it be known that my brother is like me in all ways, except he has no check on this trait!)
To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, I have created an example photograph. Thanks to the modern wonder of PhotoShop (or GIMP, as I prefer), I can safely decorate my house without ever setting foot on a forty-foot extension ladder balanced precariously on my sloped porch roof.
The beauty of PhotoShop is that I can simultaneously (a) not piss off my neighbors, (b) not kill myself on the ladder, and (c) pretend that fiction is in fact reality. (This is precisely what will happen, when in ten years, I will swear that the photos are real and how I remember fondly putting the lights up in the cold of winter.)
So, dream big! May I present to you, my holiday wonderland!