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. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
It was a LEGO holiday. My sister and her husband gave me the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary<\/i>, which will prove invaluable in writing a LEGO Star Wars<\/i> novel<\/a>.<\/p>\n I also received two Christmas LEGO sets — a snowman and a Christmas tree.<\/p>\n This is interesting. LEGO emoticons<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Saturday, I ventured out to the mall.<\/p>\n Now, I was in retail for a very<\/i> long time. I’ve worked many<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n I don’t remember it being that<\/i> insane. The stores in the mall were like locusts had descended upon them.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n GameStop was packed<\/i>. 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<\/i> (which I bought in June from my friend Tina in her store in North Carolina) could wait until another day.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n And an issue of BrickJournal<\/i>, with its sixty or so pages of LEGO Castles. If you’re at all<\/i> interested in LEGO castles, the new BrickJournal<\/i> is pr0n. Big castles. Small castles. Designing castles. Building castles. Good stuff! Really good stuff!<\/p>\n I also got caught up on IDW’s Doctor Who<\/i> comics.<\/p>\n Finally, I changed my blog’s color scheme from blue to green.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> turning his blog green in solidarity with Iranian student protesters or that I’ve gone and joined the “left of the left.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It’s a new week, the last of 2009.<\/p>\n And when the week’s over, it’s 2010. The year we make contact. :h2g2:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. \ud83d\ude42 It was a LEGO holiday. My sister and her husband gave me the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary, which will prove invaluableContinue reading “On the Christmas Weekend”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[64,228,4103,351,4096],"class_list":["post-2619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-christmas","tag-eb-games","tag-lego","tag-meta","tag-wordpress","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}