Holly's First Report Card

Well, not really quite, but here's her "uniform" from Black Friday and the busy shopping-mall days. Usually the employees don't wear matching stuff. Maybe these were for new employees, on a busy day; she's not sure. She had a paper listing the sales per hour with a highlighted note that said "Good job" and some such other stuff... (click to enlarge)

Then she and Keith and I went to a parade downtown. When we were leaving we saw the mountains looking beautiful. I said "Pinky Pie" and she said "Pinky Sky." In the car on the way she got a phone call from Brett who's in Phoenix at his grandmother's. She told him we were going to the "Twilight Sparkle Parade." Actually it's called the Twinkle Lights Parade. All in all, though, it seemed like a My Little Pony world.

The parade was an interesting combination of lit up motorcycles, antique cars, RVs, lowriders, bicycles and souped-up bicycles, marching bands, cheerleaders, horses, ponies, big dogs, little dogs, bagpipes and mariachis. Here are some peeks, but nothing here can show the length of it, the cold, the silly happiness and the oddity of it overall. Click an image, and you can go through larger sizes.

This first video might need to be for background noise while looking at details of things above. Or if you have a laptop, turn it sideways. Holly pointed out that no matter how vertical my subject matter (I wanted to get the lit-up flagpoles of the honor guard), movies have to be horizontal. Oh; right. Sorry. You might want to hear the mariachi band doing "Feliz Navidad," though.

The videos aren't great, but I really liked the lowriders with lights a lot. A little boy near us was VERY enthusiastic about car details, and at one point he said "I'm so excited!" and I'm not sure if it will be on one of the videos, but he WAS excited, and that made it fun to be near him.

I like that it was a parade in the dark in the winter, too. These are strolling mariachis, as opposed to riding-on-a-float mariachis:

Operator failure caused me to miss the pipe and drum band's music, but here they are passing by. Bagpipes and mariachis in the same parade just says Albuquerque to me.

"More lowriders!"

Ponies, and a close-up pony, and more lowriders:

I know these aren't great but I thought... not everyone in the world could go to a dark, cold parade in Albuquerque and maybe I could share. I'm sorry the battery didn't last long enough to catch the all-lit-up VW busses (three or four of them) and bugs (two, I think). Maybe next year.