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YEAR IN REVIEW
2020 was a challenging year for us, as we know it was for almost everyone during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. We do not believe our challenges even come close to comparing to those others faced during the pandemic and we are very grateful for that. This summary is not an attempt to balance our challenges with the challenges others faced in 2020 but only to summarize our light show for the year.
We started 2020 optimistic that we would finally be in the position to refinance our house and get out of debt by the end of March. Everything was going along to plan. We had our home appraised in the second week of March and all the paperwork into the lender. He told us everything looked great and that we should be able to close in a matter of weeks. We began making plans immediately to add large additions to our show for the first time in years. Then on March 17th, the Governor of Nevada ordered a statewide shutdown. That caused both of us to lose our jobs temporally. The next week our mortgage lender informed us that our refinance loan was now on hold because we lost our jobs. That meant adding the new stuff was on hold as well. But we kept working on new songs for the show on the computer, hoping things would still work out. Unfortunately, they did not. At the end of April, our lender informed us they had to close out our application because we were both still out of work. And that was it basically, getting a refinance loan was the only way we could afford to do our light show again in 2020. So we stopped everything at the end of April and believed there would be no show in 2020. One of us was able to return to work on May 11th, but not the other. Then, in late July, a bit of a miracle happened, the stimulus money for one of us still being out of work finally came through. But at about the same time we found out that because of the pandemic our son would not be able to attend in-person school in the fall. Therefore instead of making plans to do the show again, we decided it was for the best to try to get our son into a private school. But we weren't able to find anywhere we could afford that had any available spots. So in early September, we started to believe we may be able to do the show again after all. We ordered two new 350w moving head spotlights to add to the roof. That way we would at least have one new addition for 2020 if we did end up doing the show again. We planned to resell them if we didn't end up doing it and kept them in new condition. Doing the show was still very much in doubt because we both need to be off work for the entire month of November to set the show up in time. Due to the pandemic, many people were calling out sick, so getting the time off we needed wasn't as easy as usual. At first, we were denied and scheduled for November but then miraculously at the very end of October, the schedule changed, and we got the time off we needed in November to set up the show. Since we previously didn't believe we would be able to do it again in 2020 we never finished getting any new songs ready and we didn't have the new moving head spotlights programmed to turn on in any of the songs when we first turned the show on for the year. By the end of the year, we did get the two new songs above added and the moving head spotlights programmed for four songs. By no means was 2020 up to our usual hopes and expectations. However, considering the worldwide pandemic and after seeing and hearing how much doing our show meant to the many people who came to see it in 2020 we feel blessed to have even been able to put it up at all. We were also very honored in 2020 to have our show featured on ABC 13 Action News, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and The Great Christmas Light Fight on ABC.
We started 2020 optimistic that we would finally be in the position to refinance our house and get out of debt by the end of March. Everything was going along to plan. We had our home appraised in the second week of March and all the paperwork into the lender. He told us everything looked great and that we should be able to close in a matter of weeks. We began making plans immediately to add large additions to our show for the first time in years. Then on March 17th, the Governor of Nevada ordered a statewide shutdown. That caused both of us to lose our jobs temporally. The next week our mortgage lender informed us that our refinance loan was now on hold because we lost our jobs. That meant adding the new stuff was on hold as well. But we kept working on new songs for the show on the computer, hoping things would still work out. Unfortunately, they did not. At the end of April, our lender informed us they had to close out our application because we were both still out of work. And that was it basically, getting a refinance loan was the only way we could afford to do our light show again in 2020. So we stopped everything at the end of April and believed there would be no show in 2020. One of us was able to return to work on May 11th, but not the other. Then, in late July, a bit of a miracle happened, the stimulus money for one of us still being out of work finally came through. But at about the same time we found out that because of the pandemic our son would not be able to attend in-person school in the fall. Therefore instead of making plans to do the show again, we decided it was for the best to try to get our son into a private school. But we weren't able to find anywhere we could afford that had any available spots. So in early September, we started to believe we may be able to do the show again after all. We ordered two new 350w moving head spotlights to add to the roof. That way we would at least have one new addition for 2020 if we did end up doing the show again. We planned to resell them if we didn't end up doing it and kept them in new condition. Doing the show was still very much in doubt because we both need to be off work for the entire month of November to set the show up in time. Due to the pandemic, many people were calling out sick, so getting the time off we needed wasn't as easy as usual. At first, we were denied and scheduled for November but then miraculously at the very end of October, the schedule changed, and we got the time off we needed in November to set up the show. Since we previously didn't believe we would be able to do it again in 2020 we never finished getting any new songs ready and we didn't have the new moving head spotlights programmed to turn on in any of the songs when we first turned the show on for the year. By the end of the year, we did get the two new songs above added and the moving head spotlights programmed for four songs. By no means was 2020 up to our usual hopes and expectations. However, considering the worldwide pandemic and after seeing and hearing how much doing our show meant to the many people who came to see it in 2020 we feel blessed to have even been able to put it up at all. We were also very honored in 2020 to have our show featured on ABC 13 Action News, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and The Great Christmas Light Fight on ABC.