Turkey Day '05 Wrap-Up

Being that Sarah and I didn't even get out of bed on Thanksgiving until about 2 or so in the afternoon, you could say that it was a pretty laid-back Thanksgiving, even by my lax standards.

After some puttering about for an hour or so, it was time to get seriously moving. In order to keep up our "Thanksgiving Breakfast On The Town" tradition, we decided to head over to the Denny's in Willoughby around 4. This was a bit late for a breakfast, granted, but we had no idea that my parents had actually started Turkey Day dinner at a reasonable hour this year. I'd never noticed this until sometime around high school, but it certainly seems like 99% of America eats Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner at about 3 in the freakin' afternoon, while the my family prefers to sit down at the table even later than our normal dinner hour of 7 o'clock.

While Denny's worked out just dandy as a breakfast locale for us last year, it turned out to be the worst-case scenario this time around, largely due to the unbelievably sucky waitress we were saddled with. Oh well, we only had to deal with her twice in the hour and change we were there ...

From there, it was straight over to Mentor in what felt and looked like the arctic gales of midwinter. Luckily, the weather people were largely wrong when it came to the local conditions as the Early Winter Apocalypse that was called for on Tuesday wound up amounting to 3" or so of snow and a whole lotta wind (though I'm sure it must have been a real party in the Snowbelt that day). Upon arriving at my parents, we saw that the table was already set and the smell of a finished turkey hung thick in the air. Oops.

While I didn't exactly stuff myself at the restaurant, I was only able to eat one plate's worth of Thanksgiving dinner that night. Pretty shameful. From there, it was a few hours of relaxing, doing some last minute buffing and polishing to my amazon.com wishlist (hint hint!) and watching DVDs of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog and (by request) Back To The Future with Sarah and my younger brother, Bryan.

A bit later on as we were approaching midnight, my brother Brett and I briefly (and jokingly, I swear) discussed the idea of heading over to Wal-Mart in full NHL gear and busting some heads when the doors opened at 5 AM. Sadly, however, I was secheduled to be at work at noon on Friday, so the plan was scuttled. As it turns out, a few dozen customers nationwide did a credible enough job of acting like crazed bulls in a china shop on their way to the electronics section to do us proud. Gawd bless Black Friday mornings.

While we're on the topic of Black Friday, it's been pretty hectic at the store the last couple of days, but not in the way we had planned it. Yes, the business has been pretty much on target for the weekend, but we've also been up to our ears in moving and re-arranging work since the guy we commissioned to create some new product bins finally delivered most of them about three months behind schedule. We desperately needed the expansion space and it's nice to have it at last, but doing all of this gruntwork at the onset of the Christmas shopping season is exactly what we were trying to avoid by asking for these bins back in fuckin' August. Grrr.