Velcro is not your friend

We had our Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Noodlemas gathering on the weekend. It went fairly well, given the number of folks who couldn't show up for weather-related reasons. The storm didn't hit until the last of our guests were already well on the road home, so we timed it quite well.

Last year, we tried something a bit different with our C/H/K/N lights (the ones we usually string haphazardly across the front of the house). Instead of using the normal mounting method — plastic hooks snapped on to the edge of the eavestroughing — we went all high-tech with adhesive-backed velcro patches and velcro-backed hooks. It seemed to work very well last year . . . no difference in time or effort to put them up, but much easier to take down and — the bonus part, so to speak — putting them up again this year was going to be a breeze . . . just re-attach the hooks to the pre-positioned velcro patches.

And, with a minor exception, it worked exactly as advertised . . . one of the velcro patches detached from its adhesive backing, leaving an unsightly droop in the lights over the middle of the garage. Still, the job was very quick and easy . . . not an inconsiderable benefit in -9C weather.

On Friday, before the party, a few of the velcro hooks decided that they'd reached their end-of-service date and let go. By the time we got home again, over a third of them had come down. With all the other party prep going on, the lights were a pretty low priority. On Saturday, nearly half of them had fallen, but we just wrapped the trailing edge of one string around the pillar at one side of the front door and pretended not to notice . . .

Of course, yesterday we had the significant snowfall so nothing could be done about the fallen light situation, and it may well be Wednesday or Thursday before it gets seen to . . . and that will require a full re-stringing of the entire length of lights, because we now have to remove the blasted velcro hooks and replace them with something a bit more traditional and sturdy.