Black Friday

Just Finished Reading: Crossfire by Miyuki Miyabe

Well, I managed to get through Gray Monday, Darker Gray Tuesday and Charcoal Gray Wednesday so I guess that just leaves Black Friday. Talk about a busy week. It's actually no longer in my financial interest to work any later than I have to. Seriously, I've earned over a week's pay in just 3 days. Got two more days left to work too I might add so the current total can go much higher depending on business.

And how will business be on Black Friday at the store? I have no idea :-) In fact, no one in the salon actually knows what business will be like tomorrow. It'll likely go one of two ways. Either we'll be SUPER busy tomorrow with people dropping off their pets while they go shopping or we'll be totally dead because everyone already got their dog done before Thanksgiving and they just don't need anything done right now. But again, which way it goes will entirely depend on how people are feeling tomorrow.

I had a look at the ads this morning and to be honest, there really isn't all that much out there for sale this year. I remember when we first started this madness several years ago. Best Buy would offer these totally insane deals from 6 am to noon. You'd be able to get a DVD player for 50 bucks (this back in the days when DVD players ran at least 100). All sorts of cool little special buys that they'd have JUST during the weekend. Lots of custom packs like, for example, a set of toys for your laptop: wireless mouse, numeric keypad, retractable cable for your network card. This year, nothing really jumps out at me.

You know, now that I think about it, it's been a few years since any store had any deals that I thought were so good I was willing to go check them out that early. There was the time Best Buy had the cheap laptops, but of course they were sold out by the time we got there and we ended up getting a better one at Dell anyway. What's worse, even the computers that they do put on sale these days never list the speed they run at. I see processor, I see model number but nothing on the speed. So maybe it's a good deal, maybe it's not. You won't know until you get there at 4 am to get your ticket for the 5 am opening.

Naturally you can forget picking up a Playstation 3 or a Nintendo Wii. Those were all sold out the day they first came out. I suppose if you wanted to you could probably find some games for them so that when you DO get your game console you can play them, but what's the point?

Honestly, these businesses better start offering better deals or people will just sleep in on Black Friday. No sense in fighting with the crowds over stuff that's only on sale for 2 bucks cheaper.

My holiday was pretty good. More of the usual I suppose. We went over to my parents' house for lunch. I took my Sony Playstation (note, not PS2 or PS3, this is one of the FIRST Playstations) over along with my Nintendo DS and some games. Yeah, the graphics might not be as cool as the new stuff and I don't have those fancy and fun-looking wireless controllers but we still had fun beating the snot out of each other in the fighting games.

I also watched a little bit of football and I do mean a LITTLE bit. I think I saw maybe 2 minutes of the first game, about that much of the second game. Played a few games of pool with CC and really that was about it. Oh, well ate of course.

Speaking of football, that's another thing that was annoying this year. What was probably the best game of the day wasn't even running on network TV. Wasn't running on the big cable networks either. No, it was running over on the NFL network. What does that mean? Well, it means if you have cable, you probably didn't get the game since Time-Warner doesn't have the NFL network. If you have Dish Network or Direct TV you may have it but it probably costs extra. What a pain. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Instead we got yet another year of sub-par football. Miami and Detroit? What a snoozer. Ok, I DID enjoy watching Dallas beat up on Tampa Bay for a little while but that got old too.

Still, all things considered, a good Thanksgiving for me :-)

Oh, hey, did you catch CC's blog entry about the new GPS we got for the truck? Yeah, we got a portable GPS for the truck because CC tends to get a little lost sometimes while driving. When she was on a business trip, the car they rented had a GPS system in it and she really liked it. It does give you a pretty strong sense of security knowing you can just punch in the address of where you're going and this little box will tell you how to get there. It'll even help you get back on course if you make a wrong turn. In fact, because of that handy little feature, CC has been TRYING to confuse the GPS by telling it where we want to go, then PURPOSELY not following the directions. This happens most often when she takes me to work. There are several different ways you can go depending on which back roads you want to take. Oh, and today we found an alternative route to my parents' house, one that takes us through a very rich neighborhood. She's really having fun with it and ranks it right up there with our Dyson vacuum cleaner on our list of good investments :-)