Went to the mall. That’s safe, right?

Santa’s gothic stand is still in place, but no one has any more use for it.

It is as if we’ve said: The season has passed you by, old man. We’re here to return things, not ask for more from you. And why did you bring me this awful thing anyway?

We were not returning things, however. We’d ventured into the cold and damp for a visit to the Apple Store. No longer do people wish to see Saint Nick. Now they are looking for Saint Steve.

We were there to look at iPads for my father-in-law. He wanted something a bit more new than his hulking desktop. He’d told us what he wanted to do and we decided that this might be the way to go. We just had to put one into his hands.

This being his first Apple Store experience, it was a bit eye-opening. We showed him the basics in the crowded store, he didn’t seem especially into it at first, but ended up buying one. We snagged a salesman pretty quickly. He went through the data-mining procedure. Told my father-in-law to sign his device. He looked around in vain for a pen, a stylus, anything. The kid was concerned with his lunch break.

“What? Am I supposed to use my finger?” he asked, if a bit sarcastically.

“Oh yeah. Just use your finger. I see it every day and have gotten used to it. Sorry,” he said.

This was the first thing my father-in-law had ever signed for with his fingertips. We live in an age of wonders.

Got him home and opened the box. The Yankee signed him up for iTunes. I threw way too much information at him at once. He logged in, found his home network, registered and started playing with it. One little hiccup later and he was suddenly a professional.

My mother-in-law came in and said “Is this how it is going to be from now on?”

“Huh?”

She said, “Finally I can have control of the remote. For the first time since we’ve had a remote!”

They’re on a cable system that has an app which acts as a remote control.

Had dinner with The Yankee’s collegiate diving coach. They were comparing dives they threw a decade ago. They seemed to recall teammates technique with alarming clarity. Let that be a lesson for all of us.

We had dinner at a place called The Black Duck. It is an old ship that is tied to the bank under an interstate. It looks like it is falling into the river. It was featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Guy Fieri pointed out on the show that it looked like the place was falling into the river.

It could be that the place is falling into the river.

I wondered if it was happening on a trip to the restroom, where the floor is at a severe tilt. Turns out you’re OK as long as you notice the tilt. It is when you don’t feel the angle, I was told, that you should call a cab.

The steamed clams were a big feature on the show, but the burgers were the quintessential calling card. I had the stuffed bleu cheese burger. It was pretty good. You would think places featured on a show like that would blow you away, but this was perfectly acceptable. It was a bit pricey, but that could be the regional thing, too. As with the few other places featured on that show, this one gets some bad reviews online, but that could be two trolls with an axe to grind against the Food Network for all anyone knows.

The stuffed procedure involves tearing apart 12 ounces, putting the cheese in the middle and then putting one part of the patty on top of the other, closing up the seams so there’s no leakage. I was surprised to learn from the segment that these were 12-ounce patties. I do believe they cooked them down. Judge for yourself:

By the time we got back the in-laws were asleep. The iPad was nowhere to be found.