Black Friday

Wow.

Wow!

Well, we got up at 4 am to brave the crowds. And let me start by saying that I love this day of the year. It's consumerism at its best with shoppers at their worst, and the junior psychologist in me gets a kick outta watching and participating in the madness and mayhem of the day after Thanks giving. Of course, there are times when I'd like to cut through this madness and mayhem with a baseball bat, or maybe a hockey stick. Yes, shoppers at their finest.

We started out the morning at Circuit City, which was the only store that had something that I felt was really worth the trouble. It's a little gadget memory device called a Sony Pro Memory Stick Duo. It was worth the trip because it was $45 dollars cheaper than I would normally be able to buy this 512 Mega-byte do-hickey, and in this case that brought the price of this whoosey-what's-it down to a whopping twenty dollars. And since I have a Sony Camera and a Sony PSP, this memory device was worth the 20 minutes waiting outside in the drizzle, the half hour scrambling around the cattle pen of a store to find it, and the 1 HOUR standing in the checkout line to pay for said trinket.

But, just to make it more worth the while, we also picked up a Vonage phone router, which is supposed to allow us to use our phone through our Internet. The bonus here is the ability to tell the phone company to "pound sand" because we won't need them anymore or their stinking $20 worth of city, county, state, federal, planetary, universal, and cosmos taxes. Not only that, there is no charge for talking: one price gives you unlimited access to any number in the US or Canada. The box even says that we can keep our existing phone number, but the little asterisk next to that statement reveals that this is only where available--guess we'll be finding out more when we go to hook up the service. For anyone interested in looking into Vonage the only criteria is that you have a broad band connection for your Internet.

After Circuit City we made a dash for Joanne's, a craft and fabric store. Lilah got some good deals on scrap-booking stuff, yarn, and such other crafty items. I went and got coffee and some magazines. I feel this was a great compromise and effective use of time!

Uh... so anyway, after Joanne's we made the trip to Sears. Sears had two items on my Christmas list for way cheap: one was one handed 12" clamps (for those of you keeping tabs on my Christmas list, you can keep "Clamps" on your list, but do not purposefully buy 12" clamps). The other item was a multimeter, good to use when tinkering with wiring and electrical components. The clamps were half price; the multimeter was $10 off. After grabbing our goodies we went to look at Refrigerators. I could make this a long detailed story that would give you a better understanding of the one hour plus debate we held on the finer points of refrigeration and the cost of said appliances, but I won't. Needless to say, while we very much wanted a new fridge, and found one we both agreed was an amazing display of the inverted thermal cycle, we walked away from the deal. Two reasons here: one--we're just getting out from under all of our credit card debt and purchasing such a large ticket item would have involved revolving debt; and two--we felt that with a major kitchen remodel on the horizon, buying one item piecemeal might end up causing conflict with any future design and decoration efforts.

Happy in our knowledge that we made the right decision (though truthfully regretful to leave behind such a shiny and desired object), we walked out of the store and headed over to Barnes and Nobles for a quick magazine search, thus finalizing our Black Friday of 2005.

Today I'm including a couple of photos from our trip to Vancouver, BC, taken earlier this year.

:jnl