Saying Goodbye Was Hard

Early this morning I headed north to an Indesign workshop in Montlake Terrace.  For those who don't know, Indesign is a page layout program that is a wonderful tool  It can do far more than the Pagemaker 2 I started out with so many years ago.  Nevertheless, I am such a miserable schlub with the program.  I have CS3 at home and at school and it's the program we use to lay out the paper.  I am little or no help to my students, so I thought it was important to take the class the Washington Journalism Education Association was offering.  All I proved was that I need a lot more practice as well.

I made myself a promise to stop by American Eagles on the way back.  I've wanted to go the last couple of weeks to take advantage of the sales.  No, that's not really true, I really wanted to stop by to pay my respects.  I knew from visiting the shop after Drumbeat there wasn't a lot I was interested in, but I was sure I could find something, even if it was a token amount, I could use for one project or another.  I arrived at the shop at about 3:00, and it was pretty busy with a fairly consistent line at the register.  I was really hoping to find a nice 1/48th sale model of a P-6E Hawk.  The army flew these in formation at the Cleveland Air Races, and I thought it might be a fun addition to my collection.  Alas, there was no such thing, much to my chagrin.

So, I spent a lot of time looking.  There were lots of model planes, but not one that really floated my boat.  There were tons of role-playing supplements, but not many sets of game rules, definitely none of interest.  There were many leftover copies of Seekrieg 4.  There's a reason for that. Lots of very nice Clash of Arms games, but board-gaming really isn't my gig.  I finally settled on a a couple of 1/700 ship kits.  One was a Spruance class destroyer.  Designed in the 70's and retired after 2000, I figured I couldn't go too far wrong with that.  The Taiwanese picked up four of these just prior to 2000, so I can maybe use it in an Airwar C21 game.  I also picked up the Tamiya set of Japanese auxiliaries for World War II.  Comes with three handy small vessels.  Unfortunately the labeling is all in Japanese, so I'll have to check on what I actually got.

 There was something deflating about the entire shopping trip.  Though I never went to the Lake City shop enough to feel at home there, it did seem that I was saying goodbye to something familiar.  I've been going to American Eagles for years.  I remember George Edwards when he was a little boy running around the shop making his mom crazy.  I went to American Eagles when I was first married, and when I was carrying Patrick around in my arms. Today is Pat's 31st birthday.  And today I'm saying goodbye, as I said goodbye to Escape Velocity in the 80's and American Eagles in Tacoma a few years back.  They're places I grew up with, and now they're gone.