Friday, November 25, 2011

Goals For Black Friday

1. Finish making the edits on Half-Vampire (I found several mistakes in the proof copy and used this as a chance for ONE MORE edit of the book) and submit the new PDF.
2. Grade at least 6 tests for each class.
3. Clean the bathroom and living room.
4. Take down Thanksgiving decorations and put up Christmas decorations.
5. AVOID ALL RETAIL ESTABLISHMENTS OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING DRIVING ANYWHERE NEAR THEIR PARKING LOTS.

I did my Christmas shopping last week.  In my pajamas.  Online.  There were no parking hassles.

9 comments:

  1. Not me, I've been up since 5 am for the kMart black Friday grand opening. Shopping like a...
    .
    dang, couldn't make it past the second sentence with a straight face. Like you, I'm going to be avoiding retail stores like the plague. I'm probably going to go to the grocery store, I want to make a big pot of spaghetti sauce. Other than that, I'm staying home.

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  2. I think I won't even go near a grocery store. Good luck with that trip. At least your cars are all big and scary enough that no one will want to park next to you for fear of having their own car crushed if you should accidentally bump them with a an open door.

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  3. :) And I'm driving the one with the bad paint job, so they'll think I don't even care.

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  4. My number one is your number five - resist my teenagers' repeated and disguised requests to take them shopping.

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  5. Martin, just thank all that's holy that it doesn't exist in the UK.
    Have you heard of Thanksgiving? If not, it's our US harvest celebration, officially designated as the 4th Thursday in November (by Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s). It's the biggest travel holiday of the year in the US, as nearly every business closes for a four-day weekend and families gather to eat and celebrate. For many people, it's a favorite holiday.
    However, since Friday that follows is a holiday from work for many people, retails stores began having Christmas sales -- the biggest sales of the year -- in order to lure in shoppers who have a free day to to their Christmas shopping. It's a day that stores hope will put them "in the black" instead of "in the red." Hence, "black Friday." And newspapers across the country generally put out their biggest, thickest papers of the year on Thanksgiving Day, as the papers are stuffed with ads for sales.
    Stores open early with limited deals, and people go nuts. Last year (or maybe the year before), an employee at a Target store was TRAMPLED TO DEATH as he tried to open the doors for the first customers. And this was long after the advent of internet shopping that makes all of this unnecessary. But there are people who LOVE shopping in HUGE crowds and fighting over parking spaces and deals.
    I would rather clean toilets, which is exactly what I just finished doing.

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  6. You can also check out wikipedia, which explains it pretty well:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)

    (I thought of that AFTER I'd typed the whole explanation. Duh.)

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  7. Yeah, and if you go to this link,
    http://news.yahoo.com/woman-pepper-sprays-other-black-friday-shoppers-110009506.html,
    you can see that a woman peppered sprayed 10 people so she could get a good shot at a video game. What amazes me about the article is that people kept shopping after they'd been pepper sprayed. Incredible.

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