Blue to protect against the cold
Wednesday November 02nd 2016, 10:46 pm
Filed under: Knit,Knitting a Gift,Mango tree

Got to Cottage Yarns but didn’t find Rios skeins that were quite, quite what I wanted. I bought two anyway and took them home and waited before knitting so as to be able to see them with my project in both natural light and after sundown, from near and from far.

There was an element of gray to them that I just could not talk myself into. The project is brighter than that. Well, they’ll make great hats for somebody, then, that’s fine.

Kathryn did, however, have eight skeins of Rios in Cerezas, a red deepened with a bit of black that was absolutely gorgeous. It will be the afghan after this one and it made it worth the trip.

Meantime, last night when the temperature dipped to where the Christmas lights auto-clicked on on the mango tree, half of them were out. Nada. One rainstorm last year, all I had to do was unplug and re-plug to reboot and that was that, but not this time. This had never happened before and I was horrified: the whole back of the tree, and on our coldest night yet, but at least that one strand was okay. I couldn’t take off the cover to work on the other without losing what heat I had under there, so I threw a third layer of frost cover over and hoped for the best.

I searched online for opaque blue C9 incandescent strands, knowing I didn’t have any more and kicking myself for not having bought backup. You want blue because it puts the least light into the night while you’re trying to sleep–although I do have some green replacement bulbs at random, and a few blues that half the paint has come off of. (See how much brighter those greens are? Glad they’re not white!)

Thirty bucks shipping would get them to me in two days (and nights!) and nobody had them in stock locally yet. Yow. I passed for the moment.

The remote read a little colder in the morning than I would have liked but it stayed above 50F and the tree looks okay. The growth-flush areas were near bulbs that were still working.

This evening I carefully unwound that second strand off the limbs and brought it inside. Plugged it in. Nope.

I had an old strand of clear lights handy and plugged that in. It worked fine.

I tested a few of the blue bulbs on it. Worked. So I took every blue or green bulb off the dead strand and every white bulb off the good strand and switched. Threw the bad strand in the recycling, plugged in the other: okay, that, that, that, and that one, more replacement bulbs. (Meaning green. Hey, it makes it match the afghan on the needles.) Test. None of these are new; I re-replaced a few.

At last I was able to go back out there and carefully rewind the new strand back into the tree, trying to aim the lightbulbs where they wouldn’t touch leaves or limbs directly, just the wires.

The whole process took nearly an hour that I tried not to think of as lost knitting time. But this is when this needed to be done, before the sun went down, and you do what you must do.

The tree is in a blue state now and it is protected from the harm the darkness had threatened it with.


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