WiR 20241125 – Prepare for Thanking
The week prior to Thanksgiving can be a doozy, especially for work. After leaving the service and moving around in the civilian world, I’ve found an amazing consistency no matter the industry I deal with, especially with white collar jobs — a lot of people take the entire week of Thanksgiving off, which means the week before can be hectic as people try to get everything knocked out before they’re out of the office for the week.
When I was in the service, Thanksgiving in many ways was just another day, as nearly all holidays were. The chow hall would have rolled turkey & gravy along with a few other holiday staples, but for the most part it was just like working any other night on the flight line. The only difference may have been fewer planes coming in or launching, but that was about it. Nobody talked about it being a holiday or would really reference it, which was par for the course in the aircraft maintenance world.
The one holiday that you really felt was Christmas. If there was a holiday where people made an effort to shutdown, it was always for Christmas. Maybe I’ll talk about that later on in the season.
At any rate, I was ping-ponging all over California and Ventura counties, including a brief sojourn to downtown Los Angeles. It was an amazingly clear day with a deep blue sky, plus the weather was perfect, which took some of the edge off having to be downtown. I was over by the Angel’s Flight rail thing, which I hear is popular with tourists for some reason.
In the Things are Falling Apart department, I had to get a new HDD for my main PC since it became clear one of the drives was failing and I felt a sense of urgency to get a replacement and clone it before it was too late. Luckily, Newegg is right over in City of Industry, so I could grab one quick and relatively cheap. It took awhile to get the cloning process completed, but just having done it for the SSD drive, it was painless.
We also put up the Christmas tree this weekend and started in on the interior decorations. I also got a new train for the tree as well — a Bachmann HO scale train set that I got on sale. It’s a fantastic train and it’s nice to see that quality standards haven’t slipped as much as they have seemingly everywhere else. The cars have a nice heavy feel with solid construction and the engine itself is fun to watch go around the track. I had that thing going around the tree for about an hour and the sound itself was so mesmerizing that we kind of zoned out like it was the pre-smartphone era. Pretty cool.
I’m always wary about model trains, since they’re the exact sort of thing I would really dive into. The mix of collecting, landscape design, and model-building are the perfect siren song, but they’re also expensive — a dangerous combination, and I can only afford so many of those kinds of hobbies.
I finished up the week by heading over to the The Shops at Santa Anita, which is a mall right next to the horse track in Arcadia. We headed over there to check out a Japanese-focused book & stationary shop, and since it was in a mall I figured it would be dead.
Oh no, quite the contrary.
We arrive and the parking lots were nearly full, as were the parking garages. I’d never been to this mall before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I wasn’t expecting this. It seemed like it took longer to find a place to park than it did to drive over to the mall, but we finally found a cluster of spots that people seemed to miss, and headed in.
It was like being transported back to the ’90s-’00s, to the age when malls were packed, everything was maintained, and the aisles weren’t lined with cell phone repair kiosks. I kept expecting to turn a corner and see a Suncoast or a Waldenbooks.
They had a Sbarro.
They had a Sbarro!
The food court, and indeed the entire mall, was like the ’90s, ’00s, and the early teens were all compressed together into a seemingly successful and popular mall. It was a pleasant surprise, as evidenced by the fact that we found the store, Kinokuniya, early on but just kept walking around and checking everything out instead of immediately leaving like I would most any other mall these days.
What a way to cap off the week with an unexpected surprise. I even bought a Hallmark keepsake ornament of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B from Star Trek: Generations. Listen, I’m old and I loved the ’90s, so I will indulge in a little sentimental nostalgia and buy something I couldn’t afford back then. Especially when I seem to have entered an alternate dimension where they still live in The World That Was.
At any rate, the inauguration of my favorite time of year is fast approaching and I’ve got a lot to look forward to.
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👍 P Pekka
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