On the Christmas Weekend

A hectic week at the office this shall be. I can already sense it, like a great disturbance in the Force. There’s nothing wrong with that; staying busy is a good thing. 🙂

It was a LEGO holiday. My sister and her husband gave me the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary, which will prove invaluable in writing a LEGO Star Wars novel.

I also received two Christmas LEGO sets — a snowman and a Christmas tree.

This is interesting. LEGO emoticons.

On Saturday, I ventured out to the mall.

Now, I was in retail for a very long time. I’ve worked many Christmas shopping seasons. I’ve been there to the bloody end on Christmas Eve, I’ve been there before the crack of dawn on the day after Christmas.

I don’t remember it being that insane. The stores in the mall were like locusts had descended upon them.

There were only two things I wanted to do. One, get a LEGO book I’d seen at Borders on Thursday. Two, cash out a long-ago pre-order at GameStop, since I’d dug up my old receipt and I didn’t want to take their store credit.

In reality, I wanted to do number two (cash out pre-order), then number one (buy LEGO book). Howsomever, number two was impossible. Not because they wouldn’t let me cash out the pre-order, but because I couldn’t get in the damn store!

GameStop was packed. I vaguely remembered this from my years of managing EB stores in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. A line stretched from the register. The store was narrow, and it was impossible to move past the counter to get in line. The shelves were trashed, the store looked terrible. I decided getting my money back for Fable II (which I bought in June from my friend Tina in her store in North Carolina) could wait until another day.

Borders was barely better. They’re closing, sometime after the New Year, and the store was picked over in some regards. The only thing I wanted here was a book on LEGO Castles by DK. I’d seen it on Thursday when I’d gone in Borders after work, in search of a last-minute gift or three, and decided it could wait. Fortunately, on Saturday, they had two copies left.

And an issue of BrickJournal, with its sixty or so pages of LEGO Castles. If you’re at all interested in LEGO castles, the new BrickJournal is pr0n. Big castles. Small castles. Designing castles. Building castles. Good stuff! Really good stuff!

I also got caught up on IDW’s Doctor Who comics.

Finally, I changed my blog’s color scheme from blue to green.

Some may think that I’m already looking forward to St. Patrick’s Day in March or Bloomsday in June. Or that it’s a political statement, like Andrew Sullivan turning his blog green in solidarity with Iranian student protesters or that I’ve gone and joined the “left of the left.”

While there may be some truth to any or all of those — Guinness! Joyce! political protest! political protest! — the truth is, I wanted to tinker, and changing the color of the graphics and the links was an easy way to tinker for an hour.

It’s a new week, the last of 2009.

And when the week’s over, it’s 2010. The year we make contact. :h2g2:

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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