The Lights of Christmas

— पांच हजार तीन सौ बत्तीस — Holy shit did I have a long day yesterday . . . mostly just in terms of the stuff I worked on: my very long blog post about Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; then the requisite post-Christmas photo digest email about all the holiday season events I did, which included 21 photos and covered 18 separate events. I just pasted the blog post into Word just to check the word count: 6,472 words. In a Word file, that's a full ten pages of content. A lot of it is admittedly of little interest to anyone but my future self, but I have learned the hard way not to leave out certain details I may want to reference again sometime later. It took me a very long time to finish, though. And I'd had a plan to take a day drive to Skagit Valley for post-Christmas shopping with Alexia, before going to "The Lights of Christmas," a holiday lights drive-through attraction in Stanwood, on our way back. But, she texted me in the morning that she didn't feel like getting soaked shopping in the rain all day. It actually didn't rain most of the day, but this was still fine; the Lights of Christmas was my primary interest anyway, and this freed up a lot of time for me to work on the large amount of things I still have to get done by the end of the year. It turned out, the majority of the day was dedicated just to writing up my Christmas 2022 blog post. I must have started writing it at around 9:00 in the morning, after I had showered and finished getting ready for the day. Shobhit had gone to work. I broke for lunch, leftover samosas and some spiked eggnog, and then got back to it. I finally posted at roughly 3 p.m., which means I spent about five and a half hours on that blog post alone. Alexia and I stuck to the plan to go to The Lights of Christmas, a roughly one-hour drive on its own, and which she was more okay with sticking to since we'd be in her car (not to mention I had already bought the ticket). This left me about an hour to start putting a dent into my "Christmas in the Northwest 2022" email, which I then spent much of the evening after getting back finishing—I was up until about 10:45 getting that done. (Hmm, let's paste that one into Word! 3,443 words. Wow. Way more than I realized, roughly half the length of the blog post. And I probably spent close to three hours working on that one, maybe two and a half.) Anyway, Alexia and I headed out in her car at 4:00, right on time as always—I told her a few days ago that her to-the-minute punctuality might be my favorite thing about her—and at least this time there was no ice on the streets to drive on. — पांच हजार तीन सौ बत्तीस — — पांच हजार तीन सौ बत्तीस — In the end, we spent way more time driving than we actually spent at The Lights of Christmas. It was about an hour drive there and about an hour drive back, and we spent about 50 minutes actually there. It was totally worth it, though—at least this once; I don't feel any need to return, unless I hear that it's radically different every year, which may eventually make me want to go back. The ground coverage of this thing is huge. I wondered how many acres it is, and today I've found several sources saying it's 15 acres. That's apparently 0.02 square miles, which makes it sound tiny; it's also 653,400 square feet, which makes it sound huge. If that were a solid square, each side would be about 808 feet long—an office building that high would have around 60 floors. That's a lot of space in which to build colorful light displays and signs and dioramas. The whole thing was very reminiscent of ZooLights at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, just with a lot more trees—this was basically in the forest, and it really felt like we were driving out into the middle of nowhere to get to it. It was nine miles off the freeway to the west, and I just figured out how close it really was to the waters of Puget Sound, more specifically Port Susan across from which was Camano Island: the shore was roughly 2,000 feet away, or 0.37 miles. It actually rained quite hard on the drive back, and we were both very grateful to have booked the earliest entry slot between 5 and 5:30, as the whole time we were there it was dry and not raining, allowing for the 64-shot photo album I got out of it. That took this year's Christmas Collection up to nineteen photo albums, which is nuts. A bit of overkill, one could argue. And a big part of why my other year-end posts I am very behind on. As I said, though: still worth it. Of the 18 events those photo albums cover, Alexia joined me for five of them, second only to Shobhit (who joined me for seven). I love that she likes Christmas so much, maybe not quite as obsessively as I do, but arguably more than anyone else I know. Shobhit is really just along for the ride most of the time; he has no active interest in Christmas, which played no part in his upbringing in a Hindu family. And only a couple of the events were things I had to do by myself; I did almost everything with either one other person or a group of people, and I really enjoyed every one of them. The other thing I did last night was watch a PBS docuseries on rail travel in Australia. Shobhit watched several of them on Sunday night while I was working on my Christmas photos, and he kept calling me out to watch segments with him. He then saved the episode in which the guy hosting the show went to Brisbane, which is the one city we're going to on our next trip to Australia that we have not been to before. I was kind of disappointed in the segment, though, as it focused heavily on rugby playing and had little insight on tourist attractions in the city. I thought it might give me some new ideas and it gave me none. At least I already have a long list of ideas I already came up with on my own. — पांच हजार तीन सौ बत्तीस — [posted 12:29 pm]