Trygve.Com > Diary > "we survived Christmas"
toe socks, gargoyles, geek Christmas tree

Trygve's digital diary / January fifth, 1999



Hiya! Hope you've been having a good holiday season out there in web-land. Here at the treehouse, the festivities included the "we survived Christmas" party to celebrate the end of the year, the winter solstice, and the after-Christmas sales that we've all come to look forward to this time of year.


As you can see, even Max got into the holiday spirit this year.

Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of the party itself, but all were had by a great time; lots of fun people, lots of good food, and of course the party featured the traditional visit from the Evil Santa to oversee the "tacky gift exchange" and the "most...interesting ornament" contest (this year's winning entry was "Bondage Bear" and maybe it's just as well that I didn't get pictures of some of the goings-on).

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I bought yet more Christmas lights this year, including two more sets of bubble lights for the tree. Maybe next year, I'll go for a "Mad Scientist Christmas" theme; seems to me that the bubble lights at least would lend themselves to such a decorating motif.

But this year, it was a Geeky Christmas, with decorations including AOL CDs (both regular and melted), space toys, glowing planets, and garlands made from rainbow-colored ribbon cables.

With twenty-three rooms to decorate and the lights outside and in the courtyard, that adds up to a lot of lights after a while, so in keeping with my commitment to "overkill as a philosophical ideal," I hooked them up with X-10 controls so that everything could be controlled by a wireless keychain remote. Now, just in case I have a sudden Christmas light emergency any time soon (before I take the decorations back down, anyway), I can be ready in approximately 50 milliseconds!

As you can see here, not even the dungeon was safe from the creeping Christmas lights. The garlands didn't make it this year, but lights got strung up all over. Just for fun, I built a different stereo rack for down here out of rock and added another set of speakers to the far end, since this part of the house is pretty spread out.

This is probably hard to believe, but the after-Christmas party was actually the first time I'd ever worn toe-socks with a tuxedo. Guess I'd never thought of this sartorial combo before.

To match the "Geeky Christmas" theme, by the way, I made the studs out of TO-6 style heat sinks and the cufflinks were carefully hand-crafted from a pair of old AMD 286 processors. Watch for these to show up in GQ next spring....

Someone wondered what I looked like while I'm posting on the net; well, normally I take up more of the chair than this, but here are two shots of my desk anyway.

It probably looks more claustrophobic than it is, since neither of these shots show the walls with the windows or the door leading out to the office balcony (that goes out over the north gardens). It's a great view out to the west in particular, with the mountains outside the window and not a whole lot else (except for hot air balloons in the mornings sometimes, because they take off from in between me and the mountains).

Here's wishing you a great 1999 and hoping that you manage to be just as nice (or naughty) as you set out to be!

Trygve's Digital Diary
the base of the tree