Here’s the update on our December 14, 2024 Family night with the North Pole characters.
The meteorological folks were partially right – there was no rain, snow or wind last night. The part they missed is that it did not warm up 20 degrees from the day before, rather it just hit 19 degrees for a cold, crisp evening.
Despite that we had a great turnout, with folks coming as far away as the Rochester region!
We ran into 2 interesting issues:
The first one was it was so cold that even with a heater in the bubble solution, there were several times I have to hand turn the bubble machine’s mechanism to get it to turn. The bubble solution was partially frozen in the unit! Once it started to move it was fine. The most interesting point was the bubbles as they came out of the machine looked like they had fog in them, and when they landed they didn’t pop, they stretched almost like rubber. The folks got a big kick out of that! I am going to coin it Young’s rubber bubbles!
The second one was a problem. Our house projector would not turn on. It had power, but when I went inside to check, (It’s hooked up wirelessly to the display), it showed it was disconnected! As I use a raspberry pi to connect, I figured that was the issue, as my other projector which projects videos on the front of the house worked fine. This morning it’s 32 degrees, so I plugged the house projector in, and it worked gangbusters as always. None of the visitors got a chance to see the house projection videos, but there were more than enough effects going on, so no one seemed to notice!
Tonight should be interesting as it’s going to get into the teens again. I developed a plan to eliminate that issue for next year.
Now it’s time for me to get to answering the all NP letters and sending out the family/group pictures that were taken.
As always, this event is a team effort, so I would like to thank the folks who make this happen every year- Diane, Michelle, Aaron, Addison, Andrew, Sandy, Brian and our newest addition this year Inara. This would not happen without all of you! Thank you so much!