This holiday that's coming? It's been sneaking up on us. The main event in our lives day to day--work, and it seems to start before dawn and continue until bedtime. Even then, it's not finished, but just suspended until the bell rings at the other end of a short sleep.
So today, I pulled out Christmas lights to start hanging them. I have been partial to those strings that have the strands that hang down from the gutters--icicle lights, I guess they're called. Putting them up requires a trip up to the roof, after I untangle everything I thought I put away so carefully last year. Then I have to scoot and crawl along the edge of the eaves, hooking plastic clips onto the gutters and flashing and stringing the lights through clips.
Today's light-hanging extravaganza took place a little while after a heavy but brief rain shower. Looking east after I climbed onto the roof, the sunlight was refracted in a curtain of rain blowing up into the hills. We didn't get a rainbow, exactly--just the righthand leg of one bending up into the clouds, with a faint double. I grabbed my camera, snapped a few frames, and the lightshow faded in just a few minutes. Then I went back and hung the lights. They were on tonight when the next heavy burst of rain moved in.
