For our wedding, we thought it would be nice to have white Christmas lights for decoration around our banquet hall. Since it is the Christmas season, we knew they would be on sale, so we set off to find some. We had three requirements: They had to be incandescent (because LED technology has not been perfected yet - they are too dim, and they flicker at 60 Hz), they had to be white (because coloured bulbs would look silly), and they had to be on a white cable with white sockets (for style reasons).

It turns out that incandescent bulbs are harder to find these days, and most of the white cables are in the form of icicles or other weird patterns. We did manage to find a string of blue incandescent bulbs on a white indoor cable, and a string of white incandescent bulbs on a green outdoor cable. The indoor cable came with 50 bulbs (advertised as 50... actually 49 as we found out today), and the outdoor cable came with 100 bulbs. So, we had the bright idea to buy both sets and swap all of the bulbs.

In fact, we bought five sets of the outdoor lights, and ten sets of the indoor lights, to make sure we would have enough. And thus we began the task of removing all 1000 bulbs from their sockets, and swapping them. We are actually almost done now. I spent two full vacation days watching music videos and swapping light bulbs, and Angela and I both spent a few hours watching Get Smart and swapping light bulbs. There are just over 200 bulbs left to put into their sockets and test to make sure they still work. I'm getting pretty good at it, so it should take me less than an hour to do those last 200.

You can already see some of the results on last week's picture. The blue lights on the front porch are three of the five outdoor strands with the new blue light bulbs inserted.

I took this picture today before I finished assembling the last few white bulbs, to give everyone an idea of what I've been staring at for the past two days. :)

Technical details: This image was taken with my Rebel XT + kit lens at 55mm, ISO 100, f/8 for 1/60th of a second, and I used the on camera flash.