December 8, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Every year around this time, I wonder what the mailman is thinking. And the UPS delivery guy/gal. And the FedEx person, too. Because every year at this time, our house has to be one of the busiest stops on their routes. This picture, for example, is just a sample of what was delivered to our house today. Two more boxes came after I took this shot.
We had four deliveries in all. Just today. I’m expecting more tomorrow, and some later in the week. We had deliveries on three separate days last week.
Does the mailman think we’re shopaholics? Does he think we’re bad parents that spoil our kids and buy them everything they want? Does he think we have no self-control?
None of the above is true! But we have two darn good reasons that there are so many deliveries and packages arriving in December:
- In addition to Christmas, both of our kids have birthdays in December.
- The kids’ grandparents ask us to do their shopping for them, and then they send money to cover whatever gifts we bought the kids on their behalf. We shop for my parents, Cari’s mom, and Cari’s step-mom.
So not only do we have triple the amount of gift-giving occasions to shop for this month, but we also do the shopping of four times the number of family members. That’s like … what? … 1,200% more gift-buying that we have to do than the normal family that has just one holiday and shops only for their own gift-giving? (Something like that. My math is rusty.)
Maybe one of these days I’ll put a sign on the front door explaining this so that the delivery people can understand why they’re constantly bringing gifts to the house in December. It’s the craziest month of the year around here.
November 27, 2009 at 8:25 am
It used to be that Black Friday sales started at 7:00 am the day after Thanksgiving. Then stores started opening at 6:00 am. Then it was 5:00 am for a few years, and then some started opening at 4:00 am in the last year or two.
This year, some stores at the Columbia Center Mall opened at 3:00 am. But no one beat Toys-R-Us, which opened the minute that Thanksgiving was over.
How’d you like to be one of the employees there? You probably had to show up for work 4-5 hours early to start setting up for the crowd. So much for Thanksgiving evening with the family.
What’s next? Stores opening at 11 pm Thanksgiving night? 9 pm?
Meanwhile, I noticed a lot of online retailers didn’t even bother waiting for Black Friday. They were pimping big “Thanksgiving Day-only” sales online, maybe hoping to get shoppers to spend a lot of money in a turkey-induced haze.
Thanksgiving — the holiday itself — is becoming an afterthought. Black Friday is killing it, and quick.
But we did our best to celebrate it this year. Our good friend Tassoula came to visit and enjoy a great Cari-cooked meal with us. Dee-licious!
Hope you had a great Thanksgiving, too!
March 11, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Longtime MattMcGee.com readers (AKA, my family) will remember me raving about The Kingdom last year — it’s one of my all-time favorite movies. Cari even watched it a couple weeks ago and also loved it. So there. 
Anyhoo … got an Amazon alert today about a huge Blu-Ray DVD sale they have going on, and whaddya know? They have The Kingdom for only $14.49 – nice! There’s also Iron Man, LOST Season 4, Ratatouille, and lots of others. This is way tempting.
February 17, 2009 at 12:12 pm
These make me wish we drank a lot more beverages outside the kitchen than we do, and/or that we hosted parties and friends at our house more often.
A company called Meninos (from Brazil, I think) is selling this set of 16 coasters with icons from the iPhone.
How cool is that!??!
Only problem is that the whole set runs $60, and shipping is another $15. OUCH. Not even this Apple fanboy can justify that expense for a set of coasters that won’t get used much around our house.
(photo courtesy veroyama via Creative Commons)
November 26, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Was doing a little shopping today at Wal-Mart when I saw this huge display of Littlest Pet Shop stuff … and couldn’t help but notice this one item which is advertised as an Only at Target.
WHOOPS!
Hope you have a great Thanksgiving!
August 8, 2004 at 1:39 pm
Is there a worse invention in recent years than the self-scanning checkout line at grocery stores? I don’t think so. They don’t speed things up. They aren’t convenient. They expect you to be every bit as skilled as the trained checkout person — and not just when scanning the item originally, but also in fixing something if it scans the wrong way. (And do I even need to mention that they take jobs away from the economy?)
The first time I tried one of these lines, I had about six items with me — “Sure, this can’t take too long.” Well, the tomatoes didn’t have a scan code on them. The bread scanned at the wrong price. The gal assigned to monitor us daring self-scanners was, of course, busy with other customers having the same problems I was. And in the end, it took about 8 minutes more than it would’ve taken in a regular line.
And this a step in the right direction?
June 11, 2004 at 9:58 am
I’m in the market for a new computer. A NEW computer. I could get a REFURBISHED computer direct from Apple, with full warranty and all, at a nice discount over a new machine. But I can’t do it.
I also can’t bring myself to buy a used car. I know there are plenty of good cars available on a Used lot, but I could never bring myself to buy one of them.
And not too long ago, I told Cari that the next time we buy a house, it will be a NEW house, not one that someone else has lived in. We’ve been in our current house for 6 years now, and to this day I still look at various things as belonging to the previous owner.
Anyone got a good psychologist to explain this for me?
