Category: Holidays

Posted on

How dark does Black Friday have to be?

I stayed up late enough last night that I could have been in line for… well, I haven’t the slightest idea what “door buster sales” might have started at midnight, but I feel no shame in not participating. Nor do I feel shame in sleeping late. Nor taking a nap. Nor not buying a damn thing today. (I thought about getting something from Amazon.com, but I’ll see how things look on Cyber Monday instead.)

Meanwhile, I read an article online referring to police reports about how some people were so intent on getting good deals today that there were several shootings, a bomb threat and a woman who used pepper spray to clear out her competition. You’d think that in a Wal-Mart (yes, all of these incidents in the article happened at Wal-Mart stores), someone in the sporting goods section would grab a golf club or something, but noooooo, they were all too busy trying to get cheap DVD players instead. And besides, if there’s not a “door buster sale” on golf clubs, why would anyone be in that part of the store?

Posted on

Happy Mid-Christmas Season Holiday!

Part of me is tempted to start making a list (and checking it twice) of a bunch of things I’m thankful for this year, but why say it today in particular? Shouldn’t I be thankful for those things all the time? Except maybe gluttony—spending a few hours fattening myself up with extended family doesn’t happen very often. So let everyone else say “I’m thankful for…” and I’ll say something more like “I’ll try to appreciate on a more consistent basis…”

As for all of you out there who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving… just because I like to be inconsistent and keep people on their toes, I’m thankful that you guys are around to read this. So happy Thanksgiving to all (and to all a good night)!

Posted on

Less than inspired

I’m not sure why today feels like such a “blah” day. Maybe it’s because I had class yesterday and I’m feeling a “blah” aftermath, maybe it’s because Thanksgiving is tomorrow and today is “blah” in comparison… I’m sure there are other potential reasons and at least one of them is good enough to make this feel like a “blah” day.

It’s not like I haven’t accomplished anything today. We’re getting together with Mom’s side of the family for lunch—there’ll be 15 of us there—and we’re supposed to bring a salad. Since we’re awesome, we took the recipe for an eight-layer salad and added three more. If you include the mayo on top (which adds some flavor and preserves the moisture and freshness of the ingredients underneath), we made a 12-layer salad. It looks mighty impressive in the glass punch bowl we used so you can see all the different colors and layers.

Okay, I’m feeling slightly more inspired now, but I can’t think of much else to write about. Still, it’s an entry for today, so I’m still keeping pace with National Blog Writing Month and there’s just a week to go. Yay me! (Incidentally, I’m way behind in copying and pasting my blog entries into Word documents that I can save on my laptop or a flash drive—that’s the reason I still had almost all of the old stuff for reposting after I lost shawnbakken.com—so I’m gonna be spending some loooooong hours making up for that one of these days. And that’s not so yay.)

Posted on

Merry Christmas! Love, Walmart!

Today, I decided I want to hunt down the Walmart executives and strangle them with Christmas lights. Why? Because they’re continually moving the winter holidays forward. Perhaps they weren’t the ones who started playing Christmas music in October, but they’re the ones responsible for the pain in my stomach when I was reading the paper this afternoon. (I sincerely doubt it was the peanut butter and jelly sandwich…)

On the front page, there were a few paragraphs about Best Buy now accepting electronics with screens for free where they used to charge people ten bucks. It attracted my attention because I have an old computer from the 90s that doesn’t communicate with other computers anymore. Seriously. I’ve tried to put stuff in the USB ports and the old computer doesn’t understand what the hell the thing is, just that it’s being violated. So now it’s all unplugged and sitting in my room: tower, keyboard, mouse and big monitor.

The paper said the article continued on another page, so I delved into the business section, read the last few paragraphs, then looked at the other page and discovered how Walmart is celebrating Thanksgiving this year. They were the first ones to start Black Friday at midnight. This year, they will be the first ones to start Black Friday before Friday. On Thursday at 10:00pm, they will begin selling toys and clothes, then everything else starting at midnight.

I cannot insert enough curse words to explain my frustration. This reminds me of the late night TV struggles a year or two ago when NBC wanted to push The Tonight Show back to 12:05am, meaning it would technically be The Really, Really Early Show. Things ended poorly there, but in Walmart’s case, no one’s going to stop them. No one can stop them. They’re a retail monster. Hell, this’ll probably get other companies to start opening on Thursday just to stay competitive. Regardless, if they ever start playing Christmas music before my birthday—October 19th—I’m gonna hunt down some Walmart executive and teach my old monitor how to communicate with his head.

Posted on

Another year closer to the grave

Unless I have myself cremated, in which case I’m closer to… wherever I have my remains dumped. (Preferably not on my parents’ carpet.)

Being 35 doesn’t feel like a very special age, but at the moment, it does feels like the starting line to a very speedy race. I’ve got two online exams to take by 11:55 tonight, class tomorrow night, dinner with friends on Friday, a request/offer from a friend to help behind the scenes on a movie over the weekend, the rest of the week to prepare for and take another two online exams and then the final exam on Thursday the 27th, getting on a bus to Chicago at 12:05am on Friday, having fun at HalloweeM with a bunch of Mensa folks (See how they made that letter switch? Pretty clever, huh?), then coming home on Sunday just in time for arthroscopic knee surgery on Monday morning.

There are a lot of unknowns in there, mostly about whether I’ll be prepared for the exams and what (if anything) the surgeon will find when scoping my knee. I’ve played soccer a couple times since talking to the doc—he said it was one of my three options, so why not?—and I haven’t collapsed screaming in pain, so that’s been nice. I can also tell there’s something in the back that still doesn’t feel right, which is not so nice.

So yeah, that’s the next two weeks summed up in one long run-on sentence and I’m glad I could type it all out. Had I tried to say it instead, I might have run out of oxygen and been a lot less than one year closer to the grave.