Black Friday 2007

I figured some of you might want to know about my annual Black Friday shenanigans. Well, it was relatively successful this year. There was not a lot of high priced electronics that I was going for this year. Mainly stuff for the kids. The excitement of receiving the infamous Thanksgiving newspaper chock full of ads has diminished quite a bit over the last few years with all the ads being available online almost a week before. Still, perusing the ads and wishing is always fun to do.

Anyway, I didn't get to bed Thanksgiving night until after midnight. The alarm went off at 4:10 am. With all my warm clothes set out the night before in preparation for the upper teens overnight low that was fore casted I rolled out of bed, got dressed, and ate a quick bowl of Mini Wheats to give me the sustenance I would need to sprint, push and shove. My first stop was Toys R Us, which I think was pretty much everyones' first stop. I arrived at about 4:45 and got in the back of a line about 1/10th of a mile long (thank you Google Earth). Needless to say, when the doors opened at 5am, I didn't actually walk into the store until 5:10ish, which was way too late for the wireless guitar I wanted to snag for the PS2 Guitar Hero games. I left pretty quickly and headed to Best Buy for a 100-pack DVD spindle. The trash left on the sidewalks leading up to the store was about as bad as what you see left on the bleachers after a football game. Best Buy was a joke and of course the DVD's were gone. I left there feeling a little discouraged, but Target didn't let me down.

It was only about 5:25 when I arrived at Target and relaxed and caught my breath in line while watching an episode of Heroes on my Blackberry. I think it had warmed up to the mid 20s by now, which actually felt good. The doors opened and it was a mad dash to the back of the store. I was running pretty quick (I had my running shoes on!). I snagged the toys that I needed to get and was actually out of the store by 6:15! Next stop was Ace Hardware to get a red wagon for Jack and some other items. Ace didn't open until 7, so I had plenty of time and was 5th in line, which gave me time to finish my episode of Heroes. When Ace opened, I was in and out and with some extra time on my hands, I headed to Recreation Outlet (a camping store in American Fork) that had some pretty good deals. I needed to get down to a furniture store in Provo by 8am to try to get a leather recliner for $99, but when I realized it was 7:45 and there were still about 20 people in front of me, I stashed my basket of items under some sleeping bags in the corner and raced down to Provo.

I got to the furniture store and found out that everyone had been given "vouchers" to buy the hot items and that those vouchers had been handed out at 11:00 pm the night before. That made me mad. So I jumped back into the car and headed back to American Fork where I found my stash and waited for about 1/2 hour in line to check out. This time I watched an episode of the Amazing Race. Portable video players are pretty cool, especially when waiting in long lines. Home was the next stop after that. So, yes I saved some money, but it's always the experience that is the best part of the morning.

More than meets the eye . . .

Transformers fever has officially hit our house. It all started late this summer when I came across all of the cartoons for the series back in the 80s that I used to watch as a kid. The original Generation 1 Transformers cartoon series ran a little more than 3 seasons with roughly 95 episodes. The kids have watched about 75 of them. Brooklyn can name the Autobot leaders by heart. I have shown them a couple of my old transformers that I have saved from childhood, but they don't know I have Optimus Prime yet. We'll save that for another day. Looks like we may need to get some for Isaac for his birthday this year from the new movie. Heck. I wouldn't mind getting this one.

For those who want to go back and reminisce about the days of Autobots and Decepticons, take a look at either transformerland.com or seibertron.com

And of course it's not to early for Jack to enjoy the shows too. I snapped this picture of Isaac and Jack watching an episode this morning.

Learning to Dance

We've been hard at work learning some new moves. Take a look at the videos below:



Even though Brooklyn and Isaac didn't grow up in the 70s, that's not stopping them from learning how to dance.

Halloween 2007

We all made it through one more Halloween alive. It was definitely a busy day. Now comes the fun part of rationing candy to the kids over the next month. We all had a great time and the kids enjoyed the festivities at my work as well as costume parades and carnivals at Brooklyn's school. We didn't get a ton of traffic at our house. Probably a total of about 10-15 groups of people is all. We had candy left over afterwards. Aside from the teenagers that were way too old to be going door to door, the kids really enjoyed handing out the candy at the door.

Now that Halloween is behind us we can focus on the wonderful holidays coming up. However, one holiday at a time. None of this Christmas decorating the day after Halloween for us. What ever happened to Thanksgiving? It seems to have morphed into the kind of forgotten holiday in between Halloween and Christmas. Some radio stations around here start playing Christmas music the day after Halloween. Oh well. Take a look at the pictures below by clicking on the pirate ship...

Halloween 2007

P.S. Had a good run today. 4 miles with an average of about 7:45 per mile. I had a slow 2nd mile because someone stopped me to ask for directions. Otherwise it would have been closer to 7:30.