November 28, 2005

• Black Friday    So…did you do it?    Did you get up at 4, 5, 6 a.m. and stand in line to get PRICES ?    Did you brave the cold, the crowds, the lack of sleep to get a jump on gift shopping?    We did. Both of us. At different stores. At 4 a.m.   Yeah I know…we are insane. As if y’all hadn’t figured THAT out about me yet, hmm?   What is even crazier is that most of the shopping we have done the past several black Fridays is not holiday shopping. It is shopping for updating the computers, for birthday gifts, for what-ever-it-is that we need for maintaining the house ::tools, ladders, and more tools ..oh my!::. THAT is the reason I LOVE black Friday. It has not a durn thing to do with getting holiday gifts. I generally shop throughout the year for friends and family, watching sales and clearance. That is how I can afford to get good gifts on a tight budget. I would love to make gifts but I never am able to mentally get organized enough to start gifts far enough ahead of time to get them MADE by Christmas. Well, unless it is a fast gift. I need to start quilts or crocheted items or sewn things in like…well…FEBRUARY. Then I would actually have them done by say…DECEMBER 24th! The thing is, I always have seasonal projects that are immediate needs. Dang it.   So Friday morning we got up, barely, at 4 a.m. Drug ourselves out the door and Mike headed to Staples for all the computer stuff that we have been waiting to go on sale for a year. There was one big thing I wanted from Best Buy so I headed to peer and see if the line was really as bad as I thought it would be.   Oy…it was worse. I didn’t stop there…I went on to Safeway because they had a bunch of toys that were a great price ::half price..WOO HOO:: The only bad thing was here I was 5 a.m. sitting in front of a store that didn’t open until 6 a.m. and there was ABSOLUTELY no reason for me to be there! There was one…count em people, ONE other car there waiting for the store to open. Gads…I could have gotten 2 more hours of sleep! Oh how I do love my sleep. ::wah: So I sat with the heat on in my van for an hour while poor Mike was standing out front of Staples in 18 degree weather for over an hour. I felt bad for him.   Not bad enough to switch places, but bad. ::ok I sound mean, but he wouldn’t have let me switch places with him anyway, so…::   Safeway was obviously not going to be an issue to get in and out of. I went in, selected my dozen half price items that I was purchasing for Brenna and some friends’ children and headed to the checkout. Checkout gal rings ‘em all up…and ….nada.   …seems the register will not ring up my order because I HAD TOO MANY ITEMS TOTALLING TOO MUCH OF A DISCOUNT. To make it even more of a 6 a.m. happy place, there was no manager at the store yet, and there wouldn’t be one there until 6:30 or 7, and no one could find an override card. After standing waiting 15 minutes while the cashier frantically tried to find a card and figure out what to do, she came back to the register and I suggested that we void the order and ring it up in 3 parts. Well, that worked but we had to change registers because, of course, SHE HAD NO CARD TO VOID THE ORDER. ::ok…I was still cool with this yet as I wasn’t angered with her this wasn’t her fault, and I hadn’t had to stand out in the cold:: So we head over to another register and ring the order up in three parts. Whew. Done. ::oh..I didn’t mention that the ENTIRE freaking time I was at the register this dude is using one of those big floor cleaning machines that is WAY louder than my John Deere tractor, and I was rapidly losing my hearing because IT WAS WAY TOO FREAKING LOUD..my ears were ringing by the time I left Safeway::OK…time to head to Lowe’s. ::mental note..next time I go to Safeway take ear protection…and did I mention that cleaning machine was WAY..TOO..LOUD???!!!::    Lowe’s again, wasn’t very crowded :woo hoooooooo!!:: I picked up the three items that I had circled in the sales flyer: my MIL was buying me a table saw for Christmas ::Yesss…you did get that right..she is buying ME A TABLE SAW for Christmas. I am building up a wood shop and I LOVE to build things! Just call me Norma the Tool Girl:: and a gift for my BIL, and I picked up a couple of poinsettias for $1.88, a roll of snowmen wrapping paper, and a drill bit and screwdriver bit set for the house. Headed out the door and proceeded to put the two big boxes in the back of the van. Unfortunately, for my head and neck, as I lifted the table saw box into the van, due to the extreme cold the shocks to the overhead lift-gate suddenly gave way. The end result of their failure being that I was WHOMPED on the top of my head by the lift-gate of my ’94 Astro van. Now, any lift gate whomping one on the head is NOT a good thing. Being that the doors on my van are not made of ultra-light polymers like most of the newer vehicles are constructed of explains why I resembled this: I went down on one knee ::not dropping the table saw in its HUGE FREAKIN’ BOX by the way:: saying a few choice expletives ::yeah I repented for it later but the stars and little tweetie birds I was seeing really deserved a good ole fashioned *((*&*&^ or three:: while a gal ran over from her SUV to see if I was ok. ::OY how embarassing:: Yea…I was ok…mad as a wet cat and as embarassed as can be but ok. Whether it was the hard-headed Irishwoman in me, the fact that I am  thick skulled or just  that it takes more than a wussy whomping to put me down and out, I survived and gained neither a concussion nor compression injury. What I did wind up with was one byatch of a headache and by late Saturday evening and by Sunday my neck and upper back were aching. Its always worse the 2nd day after an injury for some bizarre reason and it held true in this case too. Today I am just achy and not terrible and I will pamper myself by not lifting anything heavier than a cup of tea. )    After Lowe’s and my near-loss-of-religion-experience  :goll-darned-sumna-bleeping-blooppin-watsa-frakin GAS SHOCKS:: I ran into Einstein bagels to grab a Chicken and Asiago Cheese Salad…ate some of that…took Mike the Asiago cheese bagel that came with my salad where he was now in line at Circuit City ::they have the WORST Black Friday arrangements in the known universe…just in case you were wondering…I know you have this NEED to KNOW these things:: and then wandered through Michaels’ Arts and Crafts, not finding anything that screamed out TAKE ME! Next I ran into Home Depot to look for a ladder that was on sale that we wanted. Whoops! Sold out in 20 minutes after the doors opened. Guess I should have hit Home Depot first??!! ::this wound up being the only thing all day that we had wanted that was sold out, and I consider that pretty stinkin’ good::   I followed my unsuccessful Home Depot stop with wandering into JoAnn’s ETC to see if I could find a pattern for a blouse that I fell in love with online from Alight.com. They wanted ::cough, choke, gasp, wheeze:: $108.00 for this blouse. GOOD GOOGLAMOOGLA PEOPLE! It isn’t even made of SILK!!! What in the heck are you THINKING? I KNOW that I could make a blouse almost exactly like it for less than $40.    WOOO HOO SCORE! Not only did Vogue have a pattern that was almost exactly like the shirt ::original shirt from Alight.com:: but the pattern was half price plus I had a 20% off ‘Your Whole Order” coupon. ::I bought teal blue crepe backed satin to make the shirt on the left in the pattern drawing, but with the sleeves and bottom front of the shirt on the right. I also will make myself a nice carnelian red shirt like in the Alight.com photo. LOVE IT!:: I wound up getting the shirt fabric, pattern and sew-in interfacing for all less than $26. TAKE THAT ALIGHT ! ::can I just TELL you how glad I am that I can sew??? I have done this dozens of times…its the only way I can afford a decent wardrobe. Women’s size clothes are either heinously ugly or ridiculously expensive…if it is over a size 12 ffftt…::   McCall’s and Simplicity Patterns were also on sale for 99c each. Never being one to pass up patterns at ridiculously-awesome-prices, I bought a few blouse patterns for myself. Remember the whole plumber crack deal with the pants? Well the shirts and blouses that I have are either baggy as all get out or are so large that they are starting to garner stares for the obscene amount of skin that is showing. I am pretty sure that when a V-neck  turns into hip-huggers then it might be time to make a change.    Now hold on before you think it even … I am not a prude. I love breasts! I have two myself. They are one of the most marvelous things God blessed women with. They nourish children, they make a shirt fit in amazing ways, they can be a magnet to get the attention of a particular male of the species that attracts interest, and they also provide an awesome excuse to buy some amazing undergarments. I am not flat chested :truthfully the Lord could have blessed an additional woman with part of my bustline and both of us would probably been quite content with the way we filled out a sweater and demi-cup from Victoria’s Secret:: but neither am I an exhibitionist. Therein lies part of the problem. I love V-neck shirts, wrap like the ones above that flatter and fit a “woman’s” figure, and anything with a sweetheart or keyhole neckline. I’m just tellin’ ya … some of my shirts well…they will not be darkening my breast’s doorstop again. k…consider that I sing on the worship team at church and a peek-a-boo show while singing on stage…erm…no..not gonna fly:: When the shirt isn’t doing its job and keeping the girls covered, that shirt is history. On to bigger..er..smaller and better things!   By the time I was in JoAnn’s ETC Mike was FINALLY out of the wicked-arse-ridiculously-long line at Circuit City. ::this year he REALLY got the short end of the stick on the whole shopping on Black Friday thing:: He met me over at JoAnn’s ETC to help me pick out the fabric for my shirt and we looked at the knickknacks that the store carries. Nothing spectacular screamed out at us in that department, but I did pick up two rotary cutters for 50% off and a carry-all for my sewing accoutrements that was on sale for a great price ::regularly $89.00 but on sale for $35 plus an additional 20% off::.   On our way home we breezed past Safeway again because there was something Mike wanted to see if they had ::I’ll be hanged if I can remember what it was though::. Nope….home again home again. I tried to take a nap because I was TOTALLY ragged out. I guess I was too wired … I.slept fitfully for about an hour.   Mike and I went to supper at Outback later that night: tmmm..prime rib, shrimp..salad::. Brenna had spent the night with his mom so we could go out early to shop. She then spent Friday night with my mom so we were able to go out, something that we hadn’t done alone in quite a while.   If we did anything else on Friday I just plain can’t remember. Getting up at 4 a.m. is not normal and sure isn’t healthy for my brain cells.    The blow I took to the top my head probably wasn’t a help in lending aiding to memory retention. By next year I will probably have forgotten how lousy getting up at 4 a.m. on Black Friday feels and repeat the whole process.    I can just blame it on The Whomp.                                             ~Kathie

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