Buenos Dias, I hope everyone had a nice holiday.  We certainly did.  Thanksgiving may have surpassed July 4 on “favorite holiday” list.  I never get to shoot fireworks myself anymore, which greatly detracts from July entertainment, but I DO still enjoy Thanksgiving in every sense.  Maybe I’ll buy a gross of bottle rockets next year and see if that makes a difference.  Maybe I’ll shoot them off on Thanksgiving day… Now THAT would be a holiday.

We didn’t do much worth relating over the weekend, so I’ll back up all the way to the holiday.  We had Thanksgiving dinner over at my Aunt Kathi’s, and a fine feed-fest it was.  Pretty much the traditional feast; greenbean casserole, mashed potatoes n’ gravy, noodles, cranberries, corn, rolls, stuffing, dressing, and both smoked and roasted turkeys.  At least I guess that’s our “traditional” foods.  I’ve heard that not everyone puts noodles on their mashed potatoes.  What can I say besides “they should.”  After that we put together a big Charlie Brown jigsaw puzzle, and I went out and helped the nephews build a snowman.    I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I haven’t built a snowman in 15 years.  Probably a good reason for that too, I think I slipped a disc.

Friday I hit the “Black Friday” sales like a madman.  That’s something of a yearly event at work, and embarrassingly I kind of look forward to it.  We develop our game plan on Wednesday, and give everyone an assigned store.  (Not like Jones and Kohl’s… Electronics stores like CompUSA and Microcenter and such.)  Then Friday morning we descend on them like a swarm of nerd locusts, buying up everything in site.  I got a little more carried away than usual this year… I did some serious damage.  I was at CompUSA in Independence at 5:00, standing in line, and it paid off handsomely.  I hit the jackpot on every good deal I could find.  No small victory there… Several of the things I got were limited to like 10 per store.  From there I hit some of the other stores and picked up a few of the “less critical” items, which is stuff that I have no earthly use for but bought anyway just because it was cheap.  Yes I am aware that indicates a serious problem.  When the smoke cleared, I came away with a 19″ LCD monitor, an 80 gig hard drive, a stack of DVD’s (movies), 2 DVD burners (??), Norton Antivirus, 50 blank DVD’s, an optical mouse, some cool little Atari games, a wireless network card, rechargable batteries, some flash memory, and several other items that shall go nameless because they’re “secret.”  Whew.  Ohhhhh yeah, we tore it up.

We really didn’t do anything over the weekend of note.  Kind of rested up from the holiday.  Saturday, apparently still caught up in the shopping frenzy, we did go out to Nebraska Furniture Mart and purchase a new TV.  Hopefully this will be the impetus to finally complete “the room.”  I’m a little nervous about the whole purchase… There is a very real chance that the TV won’t fit in the room.  I guess we’ll worry about that when they deliver it.  Sunday, we kind of just hung out and messed around in the house.  Cooked some gumbo, cleaned the house a little bit, pre-made some meals for this week, that kind of stuff.  We watched the Chief’s game too, whoo-hoo.