Well, next weekend seemed to be an impossibly long time to wait for two girls, and they fell despondent. The crushed joy of Christmas hung in the air. Depression loomed. G then quickly followed, in an upbeat voice--"but we DO have a small tree we keep in the basement that we can get out, and it has many lights!" Bright eyes again.
We then forgot about this until we got home, when it became clear that Vika had far from forgotten about it. She went into the basement, and started randomly rummaging about (or so I imagine...) to find aforementioned tree. This then was followed by a request for a parent, and the mini-yolka was found.
We plugged it in, and ..... nothing. Sad but true, neither of the two strings of lights worked. A quick check of fuses resembled this was not part of the problem. So, I deferred, saying I would try to find the burnt out bulb later (knowing that this is hard to do). Well, after about 4 reminders through the day, the final request came. So, trying to keep my and the girls spirits high, we took it to the kitchen for a systematic evaluation. This is where you remember G's statement of "many lights". Many is right - I didn't count them all, but at least 100, and possibly double that in this little, 3 foot high tree.
Vika, Diana (a.k.a. "the bumblebee, Napoleon, or the randomizer") and I first started on the task of removing all of the bulbs and placing them on the countertop. Vika and I could pull them off with our fingernails, while Diana used a small screwdriver, as her fingernails were optimized for scratching people, not removing bulbs.
This gave us a huge pile of bulbs sitting between us. Then, in a great show of magic and capability, Dad produced a beeping ohmmeter to test them, each and every one. I even showed the kids how to do it. We tested and tested, resulting in a large bowl of "good", and a smaller bowl of (exactly) 17 bad bulbs. I was a bit worried that we could find 17 replacement bulbs in the basement, but Vika and I went downstairs to look. In the end, we found a non-working string of bulbs that seemed close, and removed 17 bulbs, with an extra two in case some of THOSE were dead.
We then came upstairs, and found a happy, giggly Diana, beaming, and proudly showing us how she had tested the bad bulbs AGAIN, found them to be all "OK", and placed them in the good pile!!! The randomizer had struck again! ARRRGGHHH, sighs, and "NO DAVIDS" were heard, and we refocused on the task of testing once again.
Much testing and recounting later, we had our bulbs retested, with the same dead count. We then tested the "new" bulbs, and sure enough, out of the 19, 17 worked. We added the good ones to the pot, and now knew we had as many bulbs as we started with. Perfect!
Now the bulb restuffing began. Stuff, stuff, stuff. After a while, it looked like all the spaces had been filled in, but there were still about 10 bulbs left. Search, find, search, find - 8 times. This got harder and harder, until we only had 2 left. We looked, and looked, and looked. They HAD to be there somewhere - didn't they? Then inspiration - wasn't it two bulbs that had failed in the new lot? Yup, you guessed it - the randomizer, twice in a day, and a clearly non-learning Dad!
Well, it was not likely to begin with, but sure enough, the tree did not work. It was time to give up. We took it to the living room, and all agreed that we had tried, at least.
But ... this story is not quite over. Vika the resourceful apparently went spelunking in the basement once again, and had found a box of brand new lights. She took them out and plugged them in, and ... one hundred points of light! Joy, dancing, chanting - the lights are going, the lights are going ('edyot')!! So, the girls spread the string through the living room, and Christmas is coming once again.
Let the holiday season begin!
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