Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!

Yes, I went Christmas shopping the weekend before the big day. It was unavoidable, unless I had been less stupid. There were people I failed to shop for despite knowing about when Christmas should be coming for literally weeks. In particular it was bunny_hugger's family, which put the hard deadline on shopping; if it were for my family, who I won't see until we go east after Christmas, I could've let it slip to Boxing Day or even, in principle, the day we fly out or get back.

So we set off for a nearby mall, and the big bookstore where bunny_hugger occasionally works, the one whose Christmas party we went to last weekend. The parking lot was bad; we had to keep going farther and farther from the store we really wanted, until we ended up in the lot for the adjacent Chili's. On the other hand we got a great spot if we were going to Chili's, just by the door for the take-out orders. We didn't go to Chili's.

The bookstore wasn't horribly obscenely crowded, which is surely not any sign of the imminent collapse of the words-for-sale industry, but I made up for that by not doing very well in finding things that were just right, or adequately right, for the task. bunny_hugger even went off to do some side shopping of her own and came back to find I wasn't finished yet. Still, we did make time to look at the ugly Christmas ornaments for sale, and for that matter stopped in the cafe to eat lunch. A proper one, too, with warm food and soups and stuff brought out to us; I don't think I've eaten an actual meal there before, and bunny_hugger hadn't in ages.

The important thing is that we were able to finish off my shopping, and we were basically set for the Christmas action.

Trivia: The eastern border of Idaho largely follows the crest of the Bitterroot Mountains, rather than the Continental Divide, due to the lobbying efforts of Judge Sidney Edgerton. The territory governor assigned Edgerton to an outlying district east of the Rockies, and Edgerton, feeling snubbed, went to Washington with $2,000 in gold. The exact details of his lobbying are not presently known. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes,

Currently Reading: Level Playing Fields: How The Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.