It's 2:57 AM. Do you know where your wife is? Mr. Scott surely does not. Not yet anyway.
A cloudy and warm 39 degrees. I'm about to go stand with thousands of other crazy shoppers, mostly women, and shop 'til I drop.
Why? Emmmmmm, yeah, not real sure.
Give me a few more hours and perhaps I'll have your answer.
3:15 rolled around, and I'm ready. I'm not going out to shop. Nope. I was going to go out and talk to people who had been standing in lines for hours upon hours, in the rain no less. I had even cleared the pictures from my cell phone. I wanted to try my hand at journalism, this one time.
3:30, I dropped my sil a quick text. I waited awhile and no response.
At 4:00 I called, no answer. We were supposed to be at JC Penny's by then.
So I dropped another text, Did you forget me? Of course I knew they did, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had hoped they decided to wait until closer to 5:00 for the Wal-Mart opening.
I did a load of laundry. Washed the dishes from the night before and read a few chapters in a book.
By 5:10 it was clear they had forgotten me.
I stood at the door staring at porch lights glittering off the wet pavement. Did I want to go bad enough to go by myself? Target wouldn't open until 6:00.
With disappointment hanging over my shoulders, I slipped off my shoes and my jeans and crawled back into the warmth of my bed, where hubs snored away.
8:20, I wake up to the sound of my husband singing, "Get up, get up. You slept through." Then he laughs and says, "I knew you'd sleep through the alarm."
I rolled over, covering my head with the blankets. "No, I didn't."
Hubs jerked the blankets away and peered at me over my shoulder. "What do you mean?"
"They forgot me."
All in all it was good. In the years I've shopped Black Friday I've learned a few things. Target, very rarely runs out of their good deals. JC Penny's has great deals all the time. You don't have to get to Wal-Mart at 5:00, if you wait a bit the crowd will thin and there is usually still some stuff left. Maybe not the televisions etc, but who can really afford those anyway?
By 9:15 I was out along with my youngest dd. Our first stop, Wal-Mart. I needed a toaster for the kids. They had them advertised for $5. We walked around, there were no toasters left. No biggie, they had one regularly priced at $6.88. Let me ask you, if you'd been at Wally World at 5:00 AM would $1.88 been worth the hassle? I didn't think so. We left Wal-Mart without merchandise. (That's a first.)
Westlake Hardware had dog beds for $10. That's a dang steal. I couldn't make them for that. Hubs had instructed I buy one. So I did.
Next stop, Lord help my husband, was Sears. I could have killed him. As some of you know, we bought a microwave a few months back. Well since the oldest dd moved out and she didn't have one, hubs thought it a grand idea to give her ours. I wasn't too miffed, since at the time she didn't have an oven either.
Anyway, Sears had an awesome deal on a 1.6 microwave. Sears is also on the west side of town, where everybody who is anybody is out in full force. And road rage abounds, I actually call it holiday rage. People are down right rude and mean. We entered Sears after parking at Macy's, it wasn't that far, at least not walking in.
Sears was packed. I'd found all Topekan shoppers in the Sear's appliance department. The hope of finding our microwave dwindled with each step. But as I turned the corner there were two. I picked the damn thing up. This was no .9 microwave, so I sent dd on the hunt for a shopping cart. I'd seen a few people with them so I knew they were around. The goof walked right by one empty one. I'm thinking I better hurry before someone else gets to the cart first. So I decided to carry this microwave with the assistance of my thigh all the while shouting at the girl.
Purchase made. We abandon shopping cart and I carry the darn thing to the car, which didn't seem that far away when I parked. But that was before my extra burden. I swear it had to have weighed 50 pounds or more. Add to it the sleet that was currently coming down and I was one unhappy camper. Hubs should have been with me. Instead, he was at home all nice and cozy.
Oh well, I have a microwave. And a nice one, for the same price we paid for the previous one that was way too small.
Our next stop was a hop, skip, and a jump to Lowe's. Hubs had an install today and was in dire need of a hammerdrill. You'd think after being with someone for 20 years, you should know to never send them out to buy tools. Especially me! But since I was on the west side of town already...after fifteen phone calls and the reassurance that "HELL NO, I'm not going to Home Depot," we settled on a drill. One that I proudly was able to use a $10 off coupon for.
Since dd and I were on the west side of town, I decided to stop at the other Wal-Mart. You know, just in case they had that $5 toaster. Saving $1.88 is real important. So important that I forgot to run into Barnes & Noble to purchase a copy of The Christmas Carol. Of course, it could have been the grumpy man that almost ran me over with his 2008 royal blue Nissan that had left me all flustered and forgetful. He was coming around a corner way to fast. I didn't see him until his bumper was near my knee. What I did see was the car he cut in front. Boy howdy!
Just as I'm merging back on to the bypass hubs calls. He wants to know how many dog beds I got.
"One."
"Well, why?" he asks like I've defied all logic. Which I guess I did, or at least his logic.
"You said get a dog bed. A being one."
"But we have three dogs." Yes, I know this. But I also know he had said a dog bed. And since I had received a lecture earlier that morning about what to get and what not to get, I stuck with a dog bed.
I look at my precious darling daughter, who probably shouldn't have been exposed to the hells of Black Friday at such an early age, and I say, "Daddy wants us to go back..." I didn't even get the words out. She gripped the handle of the door like it was her last life line to sanity. Her nose began to flare. I swear she growled. Let me just say, when we left home she started the trip out in the front seat of the car. By the time we left Lowe's, she was in the back.
We made it home about 1:30. I could have been home earlier, but since there was a lot of drama on the home front with a neighbor, her daughter, and my son, I decided to lolligag in town a bit longer and let hubs deal with it.
The Holiday Balancing Act
2 hours ago
