January 21st, 2007

So, as noted elsewhere, we spent the weekend down in sunny, funny Seward, Alaska, (Alaska starts here!). The Seward Polar Bear Jumpoff was this weekend, which is basically a bunch of people in crappy costumes jumping into the frozen harbor in order to raise money for cancer research.

Since my camera has, roughly, a megapixel and a half, I didn’t bother taking any pictures, and I’ll be quite content to leave the snazzy photographery up to Valette (even if she did completely fail to take pictures of the soggy, barely dressed pirate wench which she claims not to have noticed because she was cleaning snow off of her camera. Valette was, not the pirate wench).

But I will say this: if you’ve never been on a 2 hour road trip with Valette, that girl has some strange shit on her iPod.

Anyways, Seward holds very little in the way of entertainment after 4pm. We watched lunatics jumping into icy water while townsfolk threw coffee cups at them. It was all in good fun, except the coffee cup throwing, and a record amount of money was raised, as well as a record amount of knowledge shared (did you know that octopuses eat crabs? And that the zodiac sign of the crab means “cancer”? Now you wish you got all educated by the announcer the way we did).

Afterwards, we checked in to the hotel and set off in search of more entertainment. Our options were: 1. A fish fry at the American Legion, 2. A craft fair at the Senior Center, and 3. A book sale at the Library. We, being the book nerds that we are, opted for 3. Which was a real shame because, by the time we got out of there, every single thing to do in Seward was over.

But, I did come out with this:

Hidden away, on a rack of tatty copies of Home and Garden and Women’s Day, I found an entire shelf of Analog. The price list on the wall said magazines were free; I wondered what the catch was.

“How are you pricing these?” I asked.
“They’re magazines,” the woman behind the counter said. “Take all you want.”

I could tell they’d been there a while, and she was happy to see magazines of any form go, but I still felt a little guilty while stuffing every single issue into plastic bags.

“Twelve fifty,” the woman said, ringing up the stack of Penguin edition Wodehouse books I found tucked away in a back corner.
“Are you sure it’s ok if I take all of those magazines?” I asked. “I feel a little guilty.”
She looked at me, looked at the magazines, and shrugged.
“Let’s call it an even $20.”

So, for less than $8, I got almost every Analog issue from December of 1979 through December of 1989 (I checked Wikipedia, I’m missing about ten issues). Holy freaking crap. Small town library book sales rock.