dcember

1. Last day of relative calm before the new store opening. Tomorrow and Friday is the soft open and then Saturday and Sunday are grand opening weekend with a ton of events planned. I'm going to have to help out at least some of the day all four days, but I'm planning to take Monday off to recover.

2. Jasper is such a handsome guy.

1. I had a lot of stuff to get caught up on at work after the weekend, but I got caught up.

2. I kept seeing ads for one of these blanket hoodie things and although it's not the season for it, it did look very comfy, so I ended up ordering it and it arrived today. It is indeed very comfy and I can see myself getting a lot of use out of this during colder weather.

3. We had a nice evening at Disneyland.

4. Gemma!

1. We got fancy bagels for breakfast again. This time managed to get up to the shop around nine or so, so there was hardly any crowd yet.

2. I thought the limited edition chamoy Kettle Chips were all sold out for good as we hadn't seen them in a while, but they got restocked, so we snagged another couple bags.

3. Chloe is such a cutie.

1. Our window for the internet upgrade was 8am to 12pm and I got a text at 7:30 saying the guy was on his way, and he arrived a little before eight. Glad we were his first stop! Since it was just an upgrade, not setting up new service, it didn't take that long. I think he was gone by 9:30 or so. Everything seems to be working well, both in terms of speed increases and, more importantly, wifi range. When Carla got her Switch 2, it wouldn't connect to the wifi if it wasn't in my room (where the router is), which is inconvenient. We hoped it was just our crappy old router affecting it and not the Switch itself, and sure enough it works fine now. Whew!

2. Since the guy finished so early, we decided to go to the farmers market and then go to Disneyland for lunch afterwards. Got two bottles of the watermelon lemonade at the farmers market, as well as some more rhubarb as Carla wants to make a rhubarb syrup to make rhubarb lemonade. We also got some delicious grapes. Carla had run to the store while the internet guy was here and I had meant to ask her to get some sort of fruit and totally forgot, so I was excited to find some really tasty grapes at the farmers market.

3. It was very sunny down in Anaheim today, though not super hot. Crowds were decent. We had a nice lunch and had a fun afternoon. Definitely felt a little wiped out from that sun afterwards, though.

4. This is what I wake up to every morning. Molly always sleeps in this spot right next to my pillow. She usually keeps me company the whole night, too.

1. I did some store visits today, none of which involved having to go there for negative reasons, so it was very pleasant. I did have some deskwork that needed to get done today that I then had to do at night when I got home, which sucked (especially since the bulk of it was pushed to today because two people did not get something to me they were supposed to do by Wednesday, even though I reminded them multiple times, so now I had to finish it all by tonight or else on my day off, because if I left it till Monday it would not leave them enough time to revise before the final deadline EOD Monday). But I got to eat some tasty food at the stores I visited and stopped for mochi donuts on the way home as well.

2. Just one more week until our new store grand opening. That was one of the places I stopped today and it's really coming along and looking great.

3. Our router has been slowly dying so today Carla got online to see if we can get a replacement, and also ended up getting us an upgraded plan, so we will have a new router with a longer range (sometimes wifi drops in the garage, but this should cover it better) and we'll have much higher speeds, for just a little more per month. They are coming to do the installation tomorrow.

4. I started playing Donkey Kong Bananza the other night and it seems like a lot of fun!

5. We got two new hires for our NoCal management team confirmed. Hopefully they work out, because our next new store is in the SF Bay area and we need to prepare!

6. Tuxie modelling how to do a perfect loaf.

We ended up going down to the park earlier than planned since the door repair guys had to cancel on us. Bummed about them having to reschedule but I was very glad to get an earlier start.

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1. Back to work today. Not too much going on. I got stuff done and was able to get home at a decent time, so that was nice.

2. When Carla was in Chicago she saw the Mitsuwa there was selling Tokyo Banana, which is really hard to get outside of Japan. She regretted not buying any, and didn't see it at Mitsuwa here, but when I googled, I saw people saying H-Mart was selling it, so she went to H-Mart today and they had it in stock! Alas, we'll have to wait until next year in Japan to have the sakura version again, since that's seasonal, but I'm sure the original will be just as delicious (we actually didn't try the original in Japan because the sakura one was too good and we just bought more of that instead).

3. Lately everyone loves to hide in this box. Only one I haven't seen using it is Jasper.

1. We had originally been planning to go to Disneyland this morning, but last night I was just feeling tired and suggested we skip our weekend trip since we're going to a show (Paul F. Thompkins' Varietopia again) tomorrow already, and just have one stay at home day. Well, turned out to be for the best because apparently JD Vance is at Disneyland this weekend and so not only is there extremely heightened security inside and protests outside, but the thought of being at the park at the same time as him is a bummer and would just ruin the trip. So we'll just wait and go sometime this week. It's not like we haven't been recently lol.

2. Instead of going to the farmers market or Disneyland, our usual Saturday morning choices, we walked up to a local bagel place and got fancy bagels. We each got two half bagels with different toppings. She got the laika (smoked salmon, cream cheese, pickled red onions, cucumber, capers, and dill) and the scarlett (cream cheese, lightly grilled tomatoes, lemon zest, and chili flakes), and I got the mia (avocado, pickled red onions, chili flakes, and cilantro) and the pre-jam (cream cheese, peaches, honey, and mixed berries). We also got a yuzu strawberry lemonade ice tea and a vanilla orange latte. Everything was so good!

They always have super long lines on the weekends so we've been curious but I'd never been before. Carla's been a couple times on weekdays, when it's not as crowded, but she'd only gotten the scarlett before and hadn't tried anything else. They have online ordering but I didn't know what time Carla would wake up, so I didn't put in an order early, and by the time she woke up around 9:30, there were no more order slots, so we just walked up, but the line wasn't bad yet (maybe fifteen minutes or so and then a bit more of a wait to get the order). Definitely worth it, though.

3. Later in the morning, Carla was talking about some Lush product she'd seen mentioned recently and it got us thinking about Lush again. There was another product she used to use all the time when they had a location here in Santa Monica, but that one's been gone for ages and it was sort of out of sight out of mind. But it turns out there's one at the mall in Culver City, so we decided to go check it out.

We got several things and then headed to the Target at the end of the mall and passed by a super cute hobby shop that had a bunch of knock-off lego type bricks with all sorts of licensed characters, and they also had a bunch of book nooks and other wood craft type stuff and we ended up buying quite a few things lol. Facebook/Instagram has been pushing book nooks on me for a while so it felt like fate. I got one book nook and Carla got three wood craft dinosaur sets and a Kung Fu Panda brick set (this brand is a lot less cheap looking than most non-lego brand bricks I've seen).

I have been trying to find some new plain t-shirts I can wear to work as I currently only have one that both fits well and feels nice (though I do have others that are tolerable). It's really hard for me to find shirts because I am sensitive about fabrics. I usually buy most of my clothes from Target because I don't like shopping and am lazy, but they don't have any good t-shirts right now, so while we were at the mall I checked out Uniqlo and Old Navy, and neither had good shirts (the Uniqlo ones I couldn't even bear to try on because the fabric felt so NOPE to me just from a quick touch), but at least I can mark those off my list of possibilities.

We then went to Target and got some random stuff (mostly food, but also a nice Encanto puzzle) and then while I was waiting for Carla to check out I got a pepperoni cheese pretzel from Auntie Anne's. Haven't eaten there in literal decades, but it was delicious. Also had tasty watermelon lemonade.

Overall it was a very nice trip. We used to go to the mall all the time years and years ago and never go, but this one is not at all dead and has lots of nice shops. Kind of seemed like back in the heyday of malls. We should do that more often!

4. Look at Tuxie's snoot! So cute!

1. I had a pretty laid back day at work today but I am super glad it is the weekend and I have a break for a couple days.

2. I am so glad I was able to get this picture. Jasper: She's lurking again, isn't she?

We ended up doing another after work trip last night. It was very hot during the day, but had cooled off nicely by the time we got there (though still a bit muggy).

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