Black Friday

I love Black Friday. There's something about getting the actual newspaper on Thanksgiving and reading through all the ads, plotting your strategy for the next day. If JCPenney opens at 4am and Babies R Us opens at 5am, I hit JCP, then stop at the Krispy Kreme for a donut to waste some time before 5am and then hit BRU. Then swing by Fred Meyer on the way home and get some free donut holes and OJ. Then hit Office Depot and Old Navy, go home, help put up the tree, take a nap, get leftovers & take another nap.

This year my Black Friday plans didn't fall together like that. I'm not sure whether there actually wasn't a lot of deals out there, or the deals that are out there didn't appeal to me, or if I'm so freaked out over the moving thing that I'm not spending any money unncessarily. I looked through all of the ads today (yes, I had previewed most of them online but there's nothing like holding actual Black Friday ads). I had paper and a pen next to me, ready to jot all the items I wanted to buy and what store they were at. This is the "potential" list, and then I rewrite the final draft (i.e., battle plan). I usually discard some ads right away (Pet Smart, Sports Authority), take a quick look at others (like Best Buy), and then comb through several others methodically (Kohls, Fred Meyer, Macys, Target, JC Penney, etc.).

There were a couple of items that caught my eye ($10-$20 items), all at different stores, but I'm not waking up at 4am and driving 10 miles to save $5 on something that normally costs $25 on sale somewhere. So while I saw a few of those things, I didn't even put them on my preliminary list. I actually wrote down several things from the Toys R Us ad, and it was also the one that opened at midnight. Score!

Even before I attempted to go to Toys R Us, I knew the best time to go would be around 3am. The craziness from the midnight people would be just about ending (as in they would finally all get through the lines), but the 5am people wouldn't be there yet. So it would be halfway tolerable at 3am. But 3am wasn't quite working for me today since we have two real estate agents coming during the day on Friday & this whole moving thing has thrown me for a loop. I thought I might as well give it a try, and I couldn't fall asleep anyway, and I could say I went out on Black Friday.

Got to TRU at 12:30am, which was a horrible time to get there because everyone was still fighting over toys and trying to find a line. The main item I was getting was an Exergen temporal thermometer. You just swipe it on the forehead and get a temperature right away versus fussing over holding it in orifices for a minute. It turned out the line wound through all of the baby aisles, so all of these people with huge cartfuls of stuff were in the aisles standing there impatiently. I couldn't even get to the thermometers. BAH! The toys I had on my list were good deals but not THAT good of deals that I would spend 2 hours of my life standing in a line holding all the toys (since all the carts were gone), and since I couldn't get to the thermometer anyway, I just gave up.

And guess what, it's almost 3am! If I was crazier, I'd go back to Toys R Us!

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We did. We went to my mom's and had a traditional Thanksgiving. Julia was in a good mood. She ate gelled cranberries (loved 'em) and turkey. She gave kisses and ran around grandma's house. She played with coasters. It was a grand ol' time for a 1 year old.