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Miscellany

Thanks, Rand McNally

May 9, 2010

One of my favorite and most popular photos ever was featured today on Rand McNally’s “on the road” blog:

I took that photo on Mother’s Day, 2006, and it’s been used several times on different sites.

With that in mind, Happy Mother’s Day to all moms who follow this blog for some reason. We had a nice day today here at Casa McGee. After church, Cari did a little shopping. I installed a new screen door off our family room, so we have a nice breeze coming in again. I also bought four little tomato plants; put two of them into a Topsy Turvy Planter and the other two in the ground. Now we’ll see if either set of plants will actually produce tomatoes. If so, it’ll be a Mother’s Day miracle.

Miscellany

December: The Craziest Month of All

December 8, 2009

boxes 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.

Miscellany

Black Friday is Killing Thanksgiving

November 27, 2009

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!