Category Archives: Photography

What kind of a monster goes out and cuts the wires on folks’ Christmas lights?

For each of the last two years we’ve had at least one set of lights with wires that have been cut through. (FWIW, I don’t remember it ever happening even once in over 25 years at the old house.)

I had written it off to an accident if maybe the gardeners hit it with a weed wacker by mistake or something like that. That’s tougher this year, since with the drought and the yard turning brown, the gardeners hadn’t been here when this wire got cut.

And then the next day…

Those are nice, clean cuts, through two wires, and with them tied off like that you can see where the angle of the cut on one wire matches up with the angle on the next. This wasn’t an accident, this was someone with a pair of wire cutters.

I think…

…but.

These lights are right in front of the door, and there’s a security camera there 24/7/365. We have those videos for something like 90 days, so I can and did go back and review them.

Nada. Zip. Zilch. No one at all seen either nights in the area around these lights.

There are some bushes there, so in theory if someone knew where the cameras were they could crawl along the lawn like they were going under the barb wire with machine gun fire just over their heads and reach out to cut those wires. But, c’mon, isn’t that a little bit far fetched?

So who or what cut the wires?

The only other thing out there, which the cameras might or might not catch, are birds and bunnies. No way that a junco or even a crow could cut those wires. The bunnies eat the grass there – could they bite through the wires by accident? But wouldn’t that deliver a significant jolt to them if the electricity is on?

So it’s a mystery. Saturday I spent some time on the ground, splicing wires, restoring connections, getting the candy cane lights back on line.

I also pulled out my trusty motion-activated, high-def trail cam and buried it in those bushes to watch these lights from just a couple feet away. We’ll see.

Because really! What sort of freakin’ monster cuts the wires on Christmas lights??!!

Any bets?

Yesterday I took the opportunity to put up a few more lights at home and to repair a few issues that had come up with the lights that got put up after Thanksgiving.

I would like to think that we’ve been a good influence on the neighbors. In past years there’s only been one or two who put up a string or two of lights. This year we’ve got six of the nine houses up here at the top of the hill who have lights up, most of them with several.

Down at the bottom of the hill there are lots of lights, but the 15-20 houses on the middle of the hill… I’m not sure what’s up with them, but it’s a dark, dark place.

So to finish up, I put a couple more strings of lights here and stretched them all the way to the bushes at the sidewalk.

At the far end of the house I got a couple of new strings into the big hibiscus bush. I would love to get another couple of strings of lights in there to really, REALLY cover it, but as Dirty Harry said, a man’s got to know his limitations.

I put up another string of icicle lights for the south end of the house, along the gutters. In the past three years I’ve only had them from the garage to the front door. Now they go all the way across the front of the house.

Finally, I added another string of lights into the plants in front of the living room. You can also now see a bit of the Christmas tree inside through a crack in the curtains.

Christmas is a week away. This year’s display is still only maybe 60% or so of what we used to have at the Pomelo house, but that house was over twice as big and had a lot of trees and plants in the front yard to drape lights off of. However, compared to the previous three years here, this is about 15% more than last year, so that’s not too bad.

Now, back to the work week.