2025
I am back from my vacation in Anchorage Alaska, as I have done every year for several years. The days are short, the sun hangs over the horizion in a perpetual afternoon, and the trees are covered in frost which makes everything look fucking magical. The setting sun makes the mountains glow pink, which is a perfect backdrop to the PF Changs or Best Buy.
Anchorage kind of reminds me of Witchita Kansas if it were colder and had better scenery. But unlike the endless building upheaval in Seattle where longtime establisments are bulldozed for a new building complex nobody can afford - everything stays nearly the same. The biggest change was an earthquake that happened several years ago tweaking several buildings and causing some to close, others to get extra supports.
Because of the cold and harsh conditions there is no need for the pretense of fashion and there seems to be a lot more of a laid back approach - nobody is in a hurry or really pissed off about anything - it's sort of too cold for anything like that.
I end up visiting the thrift stores because, due to Alaska's distance from the lower 48, nobody has thought to go through the stocks of the Goodwills and Value Villages for stuff to resell. Shipping anything through Ebay is too expensive. Internet Bandwidth was, for a time, also expensive. So software and dvds of things are still plentiful. This leads to some interesting finds.
One year I got very lucky and found a copy of Armored Core 3 for the PS2. Another year I got lucky and found a Boss DB-90 for $10. I found a $3 5 megapixel Olympus that I still use to this day once in a while to take "Early 00's looking" photos.
This year I found a retail copy of "No One Lives Forever" sealed in a 4 pack of other late 90's FPS games. I found a hat that was an artifact of Anchorage's 1986 bid for being the location of the 92 Olympic winter games.
Between Christmas and New Years is the nebulous void time where the day of the week no longer matters and the time is "who cares". The week between New Years and the first monday of the next week is a slow slog of a hangover. It's impossible to fill this time with anything productive, as everyone is exhausted.
I am supposed to look ahead to 2025 in some way, according to the endless Bluesky memes I'm seeing. It's hard to be prescriptive about a new year, part of me is just a little relived the holidays are over and my obligations to make the most out of the end of the year is done. I can spend January....looking for work. Hoping that the various hiring managers get back into the office next week and post new jobs for me to apply to.