A'Shopping We Will Go

Yes, I go out shopping on "Black Friday."

Heck, I've heard of some ladies who make a day of it. They shop, have breakfast, shop some more. But from what I heard, they mostly go in for clothes and shoes, and a lot of them go to the mall. I avoid malls on Black Friday.

What I buy depends on the offers. That's why we get a paper early on Thanksgiving; you plan out what you want most and a plan to get from one store to the other. In the past two years, when James got to go with me, what we went after was generally computer parts. He was building his own unit the year before and we hunted down a hard drive and a CD burner. We also got a cheap VCR for the TV in the spare room. Last year, after waiting in line at the door of Office Max with some very congenial fellow shoppers, we got memory, CD-Rs and slimline cases. We aren't using the CDs very fast, despite my radio downloads and my committing old files to storage, and still have a tower of CD-Rs and most of the cases left, so it's been a good deal. We got all but one of our rebates back, so $160 worth of stuff cost about $30 in the end.

This year we have some specific ideas of things we need and none of them were on sale. One of the after-rebate-free cordless phones (since the one in the bedroom has died despite new batteries) would have been nice, but they were all gone by the time I got to Circuit City. I never did find the little DVD players at CVS, but I got there at ten; they were probably gone.

So the laid-back arrangement probably worked best since I was under the weather; I'd woken up at 4 a.m. with a dry mouth from antihisthamines and never did get really back to sleep. So I was exceedingly sleepy when I reached Circuit City at about 6:30 and the fluorescent lights didn't help.

I spent most of the morning at Michael's, spending first 50 percent off coupons (including for a nice winter-themed garland). I also stopped at Borders for a bit, and had my car inspected on the way home. Then, to poor Bandit's dismay, went back to sleep. Wish I'd felt better, but that's the way things go sometime.