Vacation Day

I take the first week in December off from work for vacation each year.  It's just something I do.  It's served a few purposes over the years... a bit of a breather before our big Christmas play at church, a chance to start (or nearly finish) my Christmas shopping, time to get stuff done around the house, either generally or in anticipation of Christmas.  One of the components has become an annual trip to the mall, which I did yesterday.  I wasn't feeling it and was tempted to go to the light rail station and catch a train into the city instead.  I didn't, but I will need to do that again soon.  Another thing I didn't do today was go to Starbucks.  I knew I'd be eating unhealthy as it was, so I had coffee it home before I went.  But I took dropped the children off at their schools, came home, traded cars and off I went.  The mall was surprisingly quiet.  Many of the stores weren't open and everything seemed subdued.  I got some candy and walked around for awhile. Then I made an appointment to have someone at the Apple store look at my iPhone.  The rocker switch that turns off the ringer doesn't work.  I'm torn about whether or not I should report it as broken at work, since everything else works fine.  Maybe I'll just live with it and maybe it'll last me until the iPhone 5 comes out.  So then I walked around a bunch more eating candy and looking at stuff.  I really missed having a Starbucks in my hand, but I didn't die.  After they looked at my phone and confirmed it's not something that can be repaired, I walked to some other stores.  While not a long walk, I've never walked in Tukwilla before.  It's such a car-centric place.  It's been said that almost no one lives there, everyone just goes there to work or shop and I'd believe it.   I walked some large blocks trying to burn off some of the candy, picked up a few things and then dropped them back at my car.  By  then it was time for a late lunch.  For the second year in a row, I went with Sushi Itto Go.  I had that last weekend as well.  I think it's now finally time to try the other Japanese place or the Caribbean place next time I eat at the mall.  And then after lunch, I did another thing I had wanted to try to do this week - I got in a nice run.  The nice thing about Tukwilla is that it has long car-centric blocks and it's flat and it does have decent sidewalks.  I was able to do almost 4 miles.  I would have done more except that I ended up at a non-working crosswalk.  It was lit, but pressing the button did nothing.  At that point, I had been stopped to long to really want to start again.  That left me with a really long walk, but that's fine.  While it was freezing today, it wasn't raining this year as it has in some year's past.  On the way back home I swung by Home Depot and got some Christmas lights and paint.  Later this week I'll be painting a bathroom a color called Dashing Boulder or something.