Does Hobby Lobby count as a ‘retail store’? Because if it does, their Holiday decorations went up before 30 July . . . http://alldogssite.com/hobbylobby1.jpg , http://alldogssite.com/hobbylobby2.jpg , http://alldogssite.com/hobbylobby3.jpg (my SIL sent me these pics, which I’d send to Mr. CIDU Bill at that time . . . and no, I no longer shop Holiday items. Something about the Florida weather is really off-putting, and I have enough decorations to start my own shop.
Do they have to to make this comic funny? :-)
Andréa, I would say no because they sell supplies to MAKE Christmas-season stuff, and therefore they legitimately need a long lead time.
Christmas and other similarly-situated seasonal holidays are just one of a lost list of excuses to spend money that the stores offer as they beg you to spend money with them. Right now, the reason is “back to school”. That gets followed by Halloween, and grocery stores move to Thanksgiving while most everybody else jumps straight from Halloween to “winter holidays”.
The stores KNOW that everyone thinks they start pushing Christmas too early; they also know that if they don’t, dollars flow to the retailers that do.
And “back to school” began before July 4.
To be fair, catladymac, school starts as early as mid-August in some places, so it’s not unreasonable for national chains to roll out back-to-school items that early. And if they do, everybody else pretty much has to.
I’ve seen Christmas decorations go up in September. Usually in Wal-Mart or Home Depot/Lowes.
re “Right now, the reason is “back to school”. That gets followed by Halloween,” — I saw Halloween stuff in my local chain grocery store last week.
(“Back to school” is SO last month. . . ” I guess.)
Big Lots has some Halloween stuff out and the Disney Store has Christmas tree ornaments among its “Incredibles” merchandise.
There’s a shop at the bottom of Cheddar Gorge that and sells Xmas stuff and has a Father Christmas standing outside all year round, but it is called Old Rowlands Gift and Christmas Shop.
I work at Joanns. While we also sell stuff to make Christmas stuff, that is year round. We start setting actual “Christmas” displays of the ready made stuff the beginning of August, which is also when we put Autumn floral on clearance. :( ::::smh:::::
I expect The Disney Store has certain Christmas ornaments out year-round. Hallmark starts selling theirs in June.
I saw candy corn in the grocery store yesterday.
Bill, I was going to give the same response to Andréa that you gave: that craft supplies don’t count. But when I look at the pictures she sent, they’re of Christmas trees, and already-made ornaments and decorations.
YES,and thank you, WW . . .
Saw Christmas stuff out for sale in Bed, Bath, and Beyond yesterday.
“when I look at the pictures she sent, they’re of Christmas trees, and already-made ornaments and decorations.”
Already made, but not yet made fabulous. (People who shop at craft stores tend to consider items for sale to be “almost finished” where everybody else sees finished goods.)
Plus, of course, all those retail stores have to shop for, select, and purchase their gaudy displays SOMEWHERE… sure, a lot of them have last-year’s decorations in the corner of the warehouse but they wear out, and new businesses need to get theirs.
Hobby Lobby and other craft places have to put their Christmas stuff out early so that one has a chance to make the items before Christmas (I have a tree skirt that I started maybe 20 years ago still waiting to be finished) so the crafts need a longer lead time.
On the other hand, Hobby Lobby by the nature of its ownership and their thoughts on religion puts everything out terribly early.
I manage two Card Exchanges – I sent out the first notice for one of them yesterday. Yappy Howlidays, everyone!
Two years ago Walmart put out the back to school stuff – before school ended here in June.
But then again, school seems to end late around here compared to other places – end of June.
Meryl A – logic would dictate that, due to their ostentatious Christianity, Hobby Lobby would be less likely to put Christmas stuff out early.
Don’t worry, I know better than to apply logic to that situation.
“But then again, school seems to end late around here compared to other places – end of June.”
When school ends has a lot to do with how many days of school were skipped because of bad weather.
Several years ago, a big ice storm in December closed schools for a couple of weeks, so Portland-area schools were open almost to the 4th of July.
Christine: I feel like the overall societal message about whether True Christians [tm] are supposed to endorse or oppose the commercialization of Christmas is rather confused.
Winter Wallaby: I have a tendency to hang around with relatively reasonable people, so I’m not sure what the overall balance was. But I had thought that even the “Merry Christmas” extremists would complain about the true message being lost. (I am not kidding when I say that if I ever meet someone who insists on “Merry Christmas” I will get loudly offended at them for being anti-Christian.)
I’m OK with Christians of various sorts setting up rules like “you have to say “Merry Christmas” if you want to be one of us.
It’s when they try to enforce their rules on people who arren’t even trying to be members of their particular cult.
What actually bothers me, to the limited extent that it does, is “Christian” teachings that are so obviously different from what Jesus taught. A good example is “prosperity gospel”, but anyone who asks for a “Christian government” falls into this category, too.
What confuses me is when the same people with “Keep Christ in Christmas” bumper stickers on their cars are saying that everybody in America should be saying “Merry Christmas.” Including non-Christians. Which is… taking Christ out of Christmas.
It was always end of June for me as well. SCHEDULED to end at the end of June.
I can only remember once when snow days delayed the summer break: our make-up days always came out of spring break.
Christine: “But I had thought that even the ‘Merry Christmas’ extremists would complain about the true message being lost.”
I would also expect them to complain about the “true message” being lost, because that’s a cliche complaint. But I think if you complain about Christmas getting overcommercialized and also complain that Starbucks isn’t writing “Merry Christmas” on their cups, something has gotten confused somewhere along the line.
I haven’t seen Kirk Cameron’s “Saving Christmas,” but from the Wikipedia synopsis:
“Cameron criticizes people who feel that the holiday is too commercial, saying that because God took on material form, it is appropriate to celebrate using material things through the giving of expensive gifts. Cameron explains that presents represent Jerusalem, and that Christmas is ‘doing what God does’, as God has given humanity many gifts. Cameron then issues a plea to the audience to make Christmas an overtly religious holiday again, ‘for our children.'”
In my youth, school was out for the summer when the berry crop was ready for harvest, because the majority of the harvesters of the berry crop were in middle and high school.
Nowadays, the major industry where I grew up is designing semiconductors, the acreage devoted to berries has declined precipitously, and school still gets out about a week into June… unless there was significant time lost to snow days. (We normally got snow that actually stuck to the ground about 1 day every two years, so most years didn’t have anything to make up.
The year I was referring to, above, we got about 8 inches of snow (gasp away, Great Lakers and NorthEasterners), but the next day we got on top of that about an inch of freezing rain, and then two weeks before the temperature went above freezing. Driving in snow is a skill which can be learned, with sufficient experience… which most people who don’t live in the mountains just don’t get, in that area. Driving on a sheet of freezing rain is lunacy.
Driving in certain amounts of snow is a skill that can be learned. Once you get over about 25-30 cm, most cars get cranky about the physical obstruction. (I had someone try to tell me that clearly we don’t get much snow, since the city had shut down due to heavy snowfall. Given that Halifax and Winnipeg will get shut down occasionally, I didn’t buy that. It was even less convincing when they went on to explain that their city had had 10 cm of snow the other day, and everything stayed open.)
Portland, OR goes into panic mode if three snowflakes are spotted in the air at the same time, and 3cm can bring the city to its knees. Seattle, WA is even worse. (This is because although they DO occasionally see snow that sticks to the ground, they can go entire winters without, and so a good many people who live there never learn to drive in snow.) I also spend one winter in Denver, CO. Different situation there, because, obviously, snow isn’t a rarity there.
When I still lived in Portland, I’d avoid driving in the snow, not because I couldn’t (that winter in Denver fixed THAT) but because of all the people who didn’t know how to drive in the snow but still mistakenly believed that they did. I broke my own rule last winter, and wound up stuck on an Interstate freeway almost overnight because of 3 inches of snow that showed up around noon… too late to make people stay home in the first place, but early enough that they all tried to rush home in the afternoon, and got themselves stuck by the time I was ready to drive home. The fact that I had 4×4 with chains on didn’t help me, because of all the idiots who didn’t, but tried to drive on the elevated, banked offramps anyways, then got themselves stuck, blocking the ramps quite thoroughly. So that the sanding trucks couldn’t get up there to put sand on the snow.
Los Angeles is just like Portland, except that the problematic element is rain rather than snow. Local residents have neither talent nor practice in driving in rainy weather. It’s especially bad in early fall: when the rain first starts after a long dry summer, all the oils that have been collecting on the road surface float to the top, making everything even slipperier.
My mother always had a “avoid driving in the first snow of the season if at all possible” rule. Presumably that’s what “don’t drive if it snows” becomes if you live somewhere with more than one snowfall a year. My husband’s family on the other hand, lived where there was more snow, and he says they had no such rule. (They also lived in a “everyone owns a car” area, so the rule may have just been less practical.)
Portlanders struggle with the first rains of fall, too. It’s like, you had a whole month of no rain, and you forgot how to drive in the rain?
I went to graduate school at U of Arizona, and the first year I was there (1967) I had to call home to northern Minnesota and tell the folks I’d be slightly delayed getting back for Christmas because Tucson had had a rare snowfall and the city was “snowed in” with newscasters panicking about how the roads out of town were impassable and all that. (The snow had pretty much all melted away by the next day.)
Portland doesn’t have that many coffee shops. Seattle does, or at least, did back in the day.
What Portland has that many of is A) strip clubs, and B) weed stores.
Oh, just like Palm Harbor, FL . . . altho the strip clubs are called ‘massage parlors’ . . .
@ Andréa – Is there any way to prove whether the “Portland” is in Oregon or Maine? Wikipedia says that Marvin doesn’t have a defined location (Indiana and Sacramento have been mentioned in various strips).
P.S. I once called up an airline for a flight from D.C. to Portland, and got embarassing far into the booking process before we discovered that they were about to send me to Maine rather than Oregon. Oops.
Having read James’ Portland, OR comment right before reading the Marvin, I never even gave Portland, ME a thought!
In the Seattle area, part of the problem is people that aren’t used to driving in the snow. But part of the problem is that the cities in the area aren’t equipped to deal with a lot of snow. I’ve had experience driving in snow. When I was in Rochester, NY, we would get several feet of snow, and I’d be able to drive because the roads would quickly be plowed and salted. When we got “heavy” (meaning inches) of snow in Seattle 9 or 10 years ago, the entire city shut down. Despite the fact that I had just come from Syracuse, I couldn’t drive in it, because hilly roads were only intermittently plowed, and not salted at all, turning them into hills of ice – actually much worse to drive in than Syracuse ever was.
The area’s reputation for coffee shops is well-deserved. Both at my work, and at my local grocery store, we have a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks.
Kirk Cameron had an infamous video featuring a guy who busted all the atheists’ lies with the humble banana (not bananas again!). After all, how could such a fruit so perfectly suited to humans have arisen through nasty old evolution?
“The area’s reputation for coffee shops is well-deserved. Both at my work, and at my local grocery store, we have a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks.”
When I lived in the Seattle area (nearly 30 years ago) there’d be a coffee shop or cart on three corners of an intersection, and the people on the corner without one would gripe about it.
” the cities in the area aren’t equipped to deal with a lot of snow. ”
Portland has sanding trucks and plows, enough to clear the major roadways IF the idiots don’t get their cars stuck before the sanding trucks can get there. Seattle doesn’t, because they get snow that sticks to the ground so rarely that it wouldn’t be worth the expense of keeping all those trucks, supplies, and employees around for entire years with no snowfall.
Kilby/Andréa : The description of the city over the last week of comics makes it clear that it’s Portland, OR. But it’s not their home, they’re there on vacation.
James Pollock – school here starts in the suburbs the Wednesday after Labor Day and in NYC the Monday after. We were always told that this was because NYC did not need the 3 snow days that schools out here built into the schedule. (This because children in NYC live closer to their schools because there are so many of them and can take the subway – which never used to be stopped for snow – if they live further away- or so I was told.) School ended at the end of June. I always thought that this was the school year everywhere (in the US).
Since we have started traveling outside the area and I have been reading comics, we have found out that schools around the country start at all different times. Now if the northern states started in the summer to have enough days with no snow that would make sense, but Baldo started school a couple of weeks ago and he lives where it is hot weather, not a snow area. In Lancaster, PA school started last week (next to last week of August) – we were just there.
Now lately the rules are all being broken. NYC has had snow days several times in recent years. Schools here are pushing opening day to before Labor Day as they need the extra days due to the addition of days off for varying cultures – such as Lunar New Year and Islamic holidays (much as they had to add the Jewish High Holy days off in the 1960s). Some districts cannot move opening before Labor Day due to union agreements.
Volume of snow is highly over-rated: I had a friend in the Midwest who bragged about getting way more snow than we ever saw, and never had an issue driving. Then I visited: flat for as far as the eye can see. We essentially live on a roller coaster.
Whether you’re going up a steep hill or coming down a steep hill (and hope to stop at the bottom), a little bit of icy snow can go a long way.
Edited to add: Sorry, I somehow missed the fact that WW had made the same point about hills.
“Card exchanges,” Andréa? Does that mean I should start asking about Chanukah cards around now?
I do the Airedale Terrier Card Exchange (today is the deadline to sign up, in fact) this early because we have participants around the world (and yes, we STILL have folks receive cards AFTER 25 December).
The Cairn Terrier Card Exchange first announcement was today; deadline is 27 October because all participants are in USA (and yes, ditto).
People like to take pics of their dogs, so an early announcement is necessary for that, too. We take out dog pics in October; I send all our cards the day after Thanksgiving. http://alldogssite.com/howlidaycardsmenu.html
That would be “ouR dog pics” – one glass o’ wine and I should stop typing.
On 29 September, I went HallowMas shopping . . . The displays were EXACTLY as shown in this comic. And everything was already 20% off.
Well, this wasn’t the ‘Retail’ I thought it was – where the Halloween decos were displayed right next to the Christmas decos. Can’t find that one. Oh well, you all get the gist . . .
@ Andréa – I don’t see one that show a mixture of decorations, but this one at least talks about it. Are your sure it was “Retail”?
Comics I Don't Understand 
Does Hobby Lobby count as a ‘retail store’? Because if it does, their Holiday decorations went up before 30 July . . . http://alldogssite.com/hobbylobby1.jpg , http://alldogssite.com/hobbylobby2.jpg , http://alldogssite.com/hobbylobby3.jpg (my SIL sent me these pics, which I’d send to Mr. CIDU Bill at that time . . . and no, I no longer shop Holiday items. Something about the Florida weather is really off-putting, and I have enough decorations to start my own shop.
Do they have to to make this comic funny? :-)
Andréa, I would say no because they sell supplies to MAKE Christmas-season stuff, and therefore they legitimately need a long lead time.
Christmas and other similarly-situated seasonal holidays are just one of a lost list of excuses to spend money that the stores offer as they beg you to spend money with them. Right now, the reason is “back to school”. That gets followed by Halloween, and grocery stores move to Thanksgiving while most everybody else jumps straight from Halloween to “winter holidays”.
The stores KNOW that everyone thinks they start pushing Christmas too early; they also know that if they don’t, dollars flow to the retailers that do.
And “back to school” began before July 4.
To be fair, catladymac, school starts as early as mid-August in some places, so it’s not unreasonable for national chains to roll out back-to-school items that early. And if they do, everybody else pretty much has to.
I’ve seen Christmas decorations go up in September. Usually in Wal-Mart or Home Depot/Lowes.
re “Right now, the reason is “back to school”. That gets followed by Halloween,” — I saw Halloween stuff in my local chain grocery store last week.
(“Back to school” is SO last month. . . ” I guess.)
Big Lots has some Halloween stuff out and the Disney Store has Christmas tree ornaments among its “Incredibles” merchandise.
Selfridges in London started up in July, when the UK was in the midst of a heatwave:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/31/jingle-bells-in-july-as-selfridges-opens-christmas-shop-147-days-early
There’s a shop at the bottom of Cheddar Gorge that and sells Xmas stuff and has a Father Christmas standing outside all year round, but it is called Old Rowlands Gift and Christmas Shop.
Oops, that Selfridges ref was from was last year, without heatwave But they did it again this year when we DID have a heatwave.
https://secretldn.com/selfridges-christmas-shop-now-open-even-earlier-ever/
I work at Joanns. While we also sell stuff to make Christmas stuff, that is year round. We start setting actual “Christmas” displays of the ready made stuff the beginning of August, which is also when we put Autumn floral on clearance. :( ::::smh:::::
I expect The Disney Store has certain Christmas ornaments out year-round. Hallmark starts selling theirs in June.
I saw candy corn in the grocery store yesterday.
Bill, I was going to give the same response to Andréa that you gave: that craft supplies don’t count. But when I look at the pictures she sent, they’re of Christmas trees, and already-made ornaments and decorations.
YES,and thank you, WW . . .
Saw Christmas stuff out for sale in Bed, Bath, and Beyond yesterday.
“when I look at the pictures she sent, they’re of Christmas trees, and already-made ornaments and decorations.”
Already made, but not yet made fabulous. (People who shop at craft stores tend to consider items for sale to be “almost finished” where everybody else sees finished goods.)
Plus, of course, all those retail stores have to shop for, select, and purchase their gaudy displays SOMEWHERE… sure, a lot of them have last-year’s decorations in the corner of the warehouse but they wear out, and new businesses need to get theirs.
Hobby Lobby and other craft places have to put their Christmas stuff out early so that one has a chance to make the items before Christmas (I have a tree skirt that I started maybe 20 years ago still waiting to be finished) so the crafts need a longer lead time.
On the other hand, Hobby Lobby by the nature of its ownership and their thoughts on religion puts everything out terribly early.
I manage two Card Exchanges – I sent out the first notice for one of them yesterday. Yappy Howlidays, everyone!
Two years ago Walmart put out the back to school stuff – before school ended here in June.
But then again, school seems to end late around here compared to other places – end of June.
Meryl A – logic would dictate that, due to their ostentatious Christianity, Hobby Lobby would be less likely to put Christmas stuff out early.
Don’t worry, I know better than to apply logic to that situation.
“But then again, school seems to end late around here compared to other places – end of June.”
When school ends has a lot to do with how many days of school were skipped because of bad weather.
Several years ago, a big ice storm in December closed schools for a couple of weeks, so Portland-area schools were open almost to the 4th of July.
Christine: I feel like the overall societal message about whether True Christians [tm] are supposed to endorse or oppose the commercialization of Christmas is rather confused.
Winter Wallaby: I have a tendency to hang around with relatively reasonable people, so I’m not sure what the overall balance was. But I had thought that even the “Merry Christmas” extremists would complain about the true message being lost. (I am not kidding when I say that if I ever meet someone who insists on “Merry Christmas” I will get loudly offended at them for being anti-Christian.)
I’m OK with Christians of various sorts setting up rules like “you have to say “Merry Christmas” if you want to be one of us.
It’s when they try to enforce their rules on people who arren’t even trying to be members of their particular cult.
What actually bothers me, to the limited extent that it does, is “Christian” teachings that are so obviously different from what Jesus taught. A good example is “prosperity gospel”, but anyone who asks for a “Christian government” falls into this category, too.
What confuses me is when the same people with “Keep Christ in Christmas” bumper stickers on their cars are saying that everybody in America should be saying “Merry Christmas.” Including non-Christians. Which is… taking Christ out of Christmas.
It was always end of June for me as well. SCHEDULED to end at the end of June.
I can only remember once when snow days delayed the summer break: our make-up days always came out of spring break.
Christine: “But I had thought that even the ‘Merry Christmas’ extremists would complain about the true message being lost.”
I would also expect them to complain about the “true message” being lost, because that’s a cliche complaint. But I think if you complain about Christmas getting overcommercialized and also complain that Starbucks isn’t writing “Merry Christmas” on their cups, something has gotten confused somewhere along the line.
I haven’t seen Kirk Cameron’s “Saving Christmas,” but from the Wikipedia synopsis:
“Cameron criticizes people who feel that the holiday is too commercial, saying that because God took on material form, it is appropriate to celebrate using material things through the giving of expensive gifts. Cameron explains that presents represent Jerusalem, and that Christmas is ‘doing what God does’, as God has given humanity many gifts. Cameron then issues a plea to the audience to make Christmas an overtly religious holiday again, ‘for our children.'”
In my youth, school was out for the summer when the berry crop was ready for harvest, because the majority of the harvesters of the berry crop were in middle and high school.
Nowadays, the major industry where I grew up is designing semiconductors, the acreage devoted to berries has declined precipitously, and school still gets out about a week into June… unless there was significant time lost to snow days. (We normally got snow that actually stuck to the ground about 1 day every two years, so most years didn’t have anything to make up.
The year I was referring to, above, we got about 8 inches of snow (gasp away, Great Lakers and NorthEasterners), but the next day we got on top of that about an inch of freezing rain, and then two weeks before the temperature went above freezing. Driving in snow is a skill which can be learned, with sufficient experience… which most people who don’t live in the mountains just don’t get, in that area. Driving on a sheet of freezing rain is lunacy.
Driving in certain amounts of snow is a skill that can be learned. Once you get over about 25-30 cm, most cars get cranky about the physical obstruction. (I had someone try to tell me that clearly we don’t get much snow, since the city had shut down due to heavy snowfall. Given that Halifax and Winnipeg will get shut down occasionally, I didn’t buy that. It was even less convincing when they went on to explain that their city had had 10 cm of snow the other day, and everything stayed open.)
Portland, OR goes into panic mode if three snowflakes are spotted in the air at the same time, and 3cm can bring the city to its knees. Seattle, WA is even worse. (This is because although they DO occasionally see snow that sticks to the ground, they can go entire winters without, and so a good many people who live there never learn to drive in snow.) I also spend one winter in Denver, CO. Different situation there, because, obviously, snow isn’t a rarity there.
When I still lived in Portland, I’d avoid driving in the snow, not because I couldn’t (that winter in Denver fixed THAT) but because of all the people who didn’t know how to drive in the snow but still mistakenly believed that they did. I broke my own rule last winter, and wound up stuck on an Interstate freeway almost overnight because of 3 inches of snow that showed up around noon… too late to make people stay home in the first place, but early enough that they all tried to rush home in the afternoon, and got themselves stuck by the time I was ready to drive home. The fact that I had 4×4 with chains on didn’t help me, because of all the idiots who didn’t, but tried to drive on the elevated, banked offramps anyways, then got themselves stuck, blocking the ramps quite thoroughly. So that the sanding trucks couldn’t get up there to put sand on the snow.
Los Angeles is just like Portland, except that the problematic element is rain rather than snow. Local residents have neither talent nor practice in driving in rainy weather. It’s especially bad in early fall: when the rain first starts after a long dry summer, all the oils that have been collecting on the road surface float to the top, making everything even slipperier.
My mother always had a “avoid driving in the first snow of the season if at all possible” rule. Presumably that’s what “don’t drive if it snows” becomes if you live somewhere with more than one snowfall a year. My husband’s family on the other hand, lived where there was more snow, and he says they had no such rule. (They also lived in a “everyone owns a car” area, so the rule may have just been less practical.)
Portlanders struggle with the first rains of fall, too. It’s like, you had a whole month of no rain, and you forgot how to drive in the rain?
I went to graduate school at U of Arizona, and the first year I was there (1967) I had to call home to northern Minnesota and tell the folks I’d be slightly delayed getting back for Christmas because Tucson had had a rare snowfall and the city was “snowed in” with newscasters panicking about how the roads out of town were impassable and all that. (The snow had pretty much all melted away by the next day.)
For James . . . https://joshreads.com/images/18/08/i180824marvin.jpg
Portland doesn’t have that many coffee shops. Seattle does, or at least, did back in the day.
What Portland has that many of is A) strip clubs, and B) weed stores.
Oh, just like Palm Harbor, FL . . . altho the strip clubs are called ‘massage parlors’ . . .
@ Andréa – Is there any way to prove whether the “Portland” is in Oregon or Maine? Wikipedia says that Marvin doesn’t have a defined location (Indiana and Sacramento have been mentioned in various strips).
P.S. I once called up an airline for a flight from D.C. to Portland, and got embarassing far into the booking process before we discovered that they were about to send me to Maine rather than Oregon. Oops.
Having read James’ Portland, OR comment right before reading the Marvin, I never even gave Portland, ME a thought!
In the Seattle area, part of the problem is people that aren’t used to driving in the snow. But part of the problem is that the cities in the area aren’t equipped to deal with a lot of snow. I’ve had experience driving in snow. When I was in Rochester, NY, we would get several feet of snow, and I’d be able to drive because the roads would quickly be plowed and salted. When we got “heavy” (meaning inches) of snow in Seattle 9 or 10 years ago, the entire city shut down. Despite the fact that I had just come from Syracuse, I couldn’t drive in it, because hilly roads were only intermittently plowed, and not salted at all, turning them into hills of ice – actually much worse to drive in than Syracuse ever was.
The area’s reputation for coffee shops is well-deserved. Both at my work, and at my local grocery store, we have a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks.
Kirk Cameron had an infamous video featuring a guy who busted all the atheists’ lies with the humble banana (not bananas again!). After all, how could such a fruit so perfectly suited to humans have arisen through nasty old evolution?
Brian: Kirk Cameron: Back to Atheism Thanks to Bruised Banana
“The area’s reputation for coffee shops is well-deserved. Both at my work, and at my local grocery store, we have a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks.”
When I lived in the Seattle area (nearly 30 years ago) there’d be a coffee shop or cart on three corners of an intersection, and the people on the corner without one would gripe about it.
” the cities in the area aren’t equipped to deal with a lot of snow. ”
Portland has sanding trucks and plows, enough to clear the major roadways IF the idiots don’t get their cars stuck before the sanding trucks can get there. Seattle doesn’t, because they get snow that sticks to the ground so rarely that it wouldn’t be worth the expense of keeping all those trucks, supplies, and employees around for entire years with no snowfall.
Kilby/Andréa : The description of the city over the last week of comics makes it clear that it’s Portland, OR. But it’s not their home, they’re there on vacation.
James Pollock – school here starts in the suburbs the Wednesday after Labor Day and in NYC the Monday after. We were always told that this was because NYC did not need the 3 snow days that schools out here built into the schedule. (This because children in NYC live closer to their schools because there are so many of them and can take the subway – which never used to be stopped for snow – if they live further away- or so I was told.) School ended at the end of June. I always thought that this was the school year everywhere (in the US).
Since we have started traveling outside the area and I have been reading comics, we have found out that schools around the country start at all different times. Now if the northern states started in the summer to have enough days with no snow that would make sense, but Baldo started school a couple of weeks ago and he lives where it is hot weather, not a snow area. In Lancaster, PA school started last week (next to last week of August) – we were just there.
Now lately the rules are all being broken. NYC has had snow days several times in recent years. Schools here are pushing opening day to before Labor Day as they need the extra days due to the addition of days off for varying cultures – such as Lunar New Year and Islamic holidays (much as they had to add the Jewish High Holy days off in the 1960s). Some districts cannot move opening before Labor Day due to union agreements.
Volume of snow is highly over-rated: I had a friend in the Midwest who bragged about getting way more snow than we ever saw, and never had an issue driving. Then I visited: flat for as far as the eye can see. We essentially live on a roller coaster.
Whether you’re going up a steep hill or coming down a steep hill (and hope to stop at the bottom), a little bit of icy snow can go a long way.
Edited to add: Sorry, I somehow missed the fact that WW had made the same point about hills.
“Card exchanges,” Andréa? Does that mean I should start asking about Chanukah cards around now?
I do the Airedale Terrier Card Exchange (today is the deadline to sign up, in fact) this early because we have participants around the world (and yes, we STILL have folks receive cards AFTER 25 December).
The Cairn Terrier Card Exchange first announcement was today; deadline is 27 October because all participants are in USA (and yes, ditto).
People like to take pics of their dogs, so an early announcement is necessary for that, too. We take out dog pics in October; I send all our cards the day after Thanksgiving.
http://alldogssite.com/howlidaycardsmenu.html
That would be “ouR dog pics” – one glass o’ wine and I should stop typing.
On 29 September, I went HallowMas shopping . . . The displays were EXACTLY as shown in this comic. And everything was already 20% off.
Well, this wasn’t the ‘Retail’ I thought it was – where the Halloween decos were displayed right next to the Christmas decos. Can’t find that one. Oh well, you all get the gist . . .
@ Andréa – I don’t see one that show a mixture of decorations, but this one at least talks about it. Are your sure it was “Retail”?
Yep – my photogenic memory, I mean, photographic memory, was right again . . .
http://retailcomic.com/comics/september-23-2018/
@ Andréa – Well, then that explains everything. I’m pretty sure that one hasn’t shown up at CIDU yet: it was completely new to me.