Welcome to the Christmoose Season!

We started our Thanksgiving weekend on a pretty relaxed note. No gatherings or big meals - just a festival of snacks and also hanging around time. We were hoping to find a Godzilla or Twilight Zone marathon on tv to waste all our time on, but no luck. So we wound up watching all of season 4 of The Office via Netflix on demand, which was entertaining. We also did some house stuff, but not too much, as did not want to strain ourselves.
Friday started off slow as well. After getting up at the crack of dawn (OK, 10:30) as we did some more house stuff, but in a gradual way, so as not to strain ourselves. As we were going downtown anyway for a civic event in the evening, we decided to go a couple of hours early and do some shopping. We did not even think about the fact that this technically made us "Black Friday" shoppers, as we did not have the Black Friday spirit when we set out. It did not dawn on me until we were entering the downtown area that we were driving into a potential maelstrom of chaos and despair. However, we still easily got a spot in the parking deck, although we were forced to go to an upper deck. We took the opportunity to have lunch at a local institution, the White Spot, for more of which see my food blog. Then we hit the Mall, bracing ourselves for the onslought.
It was not that bad. It was maybe a little more crowded than usual, but there were none of the swirling, hate-filled crowds you see on Black Friday newscasts. Anyway, we did what shopping we could in the mall, then went to the Museum, which was holding a craft show and book expo.
Craft shows in Museums are serious affairs, with serious handmade usuable-art-style objects. The arty craft show could not fill our remaining shopping needs, so we went the upper level, which was holding the Read Alaska! book expo and meet-the-author event. The books were either kids' books about Ollie the Otter and Shishlak the Seal and that sort of thing, or grim nonfiction. I am generally a non-fiction reader, but these were all first person narratives about bear-attack survival or histories of B-17's in Alaska or a survey of snowmachining paths in the Kenai Peninsula. There was also a bare smattering of Alaska based mystery novels. I might have even wanted some of these books, but each table had a desparate-eyed author standing there, pushing their books at everyone. Let me offer a word of advice to any small-press authors out there. Don't sell your book in person! You will never be able to summon the detachment necessary to let people examine your book without feeling uncomfortable. Under these circumstances, a potential buyer cannot possibly pick up your book and give it an honest assessment. You are looking right at them. They get very uncomfortable. And I am not the only one who feels this way. Art and I were part of a swiftly moving stream of people who ran the author gauntlet, all of us keeping three rules in mind:1) never make eye contact, 2) never stop moving, and 3) do not talk about Fight Club. I broke the eye-contact rule (this has always been a tough one for me, which is why crazy people always talk to me out of the thousands of people available on any given street), and had to be rescued from the author, who was assailing me with her sales pitch. "It sounds really interesting" Art said, carefully not looking into her eyes "We are taking your card so we remember to come back for a copy." Then he grabbed my arm and hustled me away. I feel a first person author-harassment survival book coming on.