Well, I said last year that I wouldn't go back out early on Black Friday ever again. Then, I said I'd go out, but not go to Wal-Mart, after the Great Transformers Incident of 2007. Looks like I was wrong on both counts. We did go out, and began the day at, you guessed it, Wal-Mart.

Most of the time, Wal-Mart is fairly organized as far as employees go; it's the other shoppers you have to worry about. Not so this year. Apparently, for the biggest shopping day of the year, the Wal-Mart manager forgot to have a meeting to go over everything to prepare. Here's a short list of the incompetency on display by Wal-Mart employees.

As soon as we walked in, we asked a checkout clerk where the store maps were (all the Black Friday deals are in weird places, like DVDs in the frozen goods). She told me she hadn't seen them but knew they were out there somewhere. It turned out a lady standing about 10 feet from said cashier was handing out said maps. /facepalm #1.

When 5 AM finally hit, I was waiting in the line for electronics, as I wanted to pick up some cheap Blu-rays. Turns out I could have picked up the Blu-rays earlier, because the line I was waiting in was for "behind the counter" items. So I walk around, get the Blu-rays, and a guy next to me says that the regular ones off the shelf aren't the sale ones, and you have to locate the proper display shelf with the BF deals. It seemed odd, but an employee verified it, so I put my catch back on the shelves and headed out. On the way, I ask an employee where the discounted Blu-rays are. "Blu-rays?" she says. /facepalm #2. Yes, high def movies, I say, and she directs me to the grocery aisles, where, naturally, all the movies are. All the DVDs, that is. No Blu-rays to be found. I'm pretty upset at this point, as I've been there for 30 minutes and all I have is Spaceballs on DVD for $2 to show for it.

Turns out there are no Blu-rays by the groceries. My fellow BF shopper Chris tells me that the DVDs are scanning as the sale price no matter where you get them, so back I go to the electronics for the stuff I already had once and put back. ARGH. On the way, I ask an employee passing out memory cards about the cheap 8 gig flash drive. He smiles and laughs, and points at the Photo line. Which is horrendously long. He recommends I skip it, and I take his advice.

I head to the electronics desk, and ask about the AC/DC Rock Band bundle. The first employee gives me a blank stare and asks if I mean "that guitar game". When I told her I didn't, she asked the lady next to her. And she asked the lady next to her. And she asked the manager-type next to her. All like some huge game of pass it on. Manager-type knew what I meant, and handed me one. I walked off and noticed it was the PS3 version. ARGH again. I fight back to the fellow and get the correct version. /facepalm #3.

Now, here's the best part. Remember the map? It said that all the toys in the ad were in front of the toys section. Seems natural, right? Except the toys section is about 100' across, and there are wall to wall people there, and if you just want one thing, who knows where it is? Why even have a map if it doesn't tell you where specific items are? I make my way back, and ask an employee opening up boxes where the Power Rangers Helmets are. "I don't even know what that is!" she informs me. I kid you not, a lady next to me shoves the BF ad in this employees face, points to the helmet, and says "THIS ONE RIGHT HERE". Of course, that didn't help. I am quickly growing tired of this, and make my way to the front of the store. /facepalm #4. We did manage to find the Transformers hoodies. None in my size, more's the pity. We finally got out of Wal-Mart at 5:40. That's way later than normal and put us far behind schedule.

We did find a Power Rangers helmet at Toys R Us, surprisingly for $10 less. TRU was totally different; stuff was easy to find, but the line to check out was hideously long. It moved fairly quickly though; I'd say we were waiting about 30 minutes before we got behind a checkout counter. Unfortunately, we picked the wrong one. One lady's credit card didn't go through repeatedly, so she filled out a credit app. On Black Friday. At 6:30 in the morning. The next lady behind her had a cart full of items that she wanted rung up individually. I can't believe that they let her do that. We ended up switching lines, and got out relatively unscathed.

Gamecrazy was next, and had 2 of the 3 things I needed. The line went out the door into the cold, due to how small the store is. But it was fairly quick. From there, we drove past Target and laughed at how full it was on our way to breakfast. That was easily the highlight of the day; meeting up with our friends to eat and sharing stories is a hoot, every year. My country fried steak was terrible but the chococlate chips pancakes were good. No facepalm here.

Worn out, we decided to check K-Mart (picked clean), Big Lots (no cool stuff), and Radio Shack (never even had PS3 controllers in stock). All in all, a busy day, but we got some deals and I can't wait to give the stuff out soon. I'd say I won't go back to Wal-Mart next year, but I know I will. The cheap stuff compels me, and I always get to tell the crazy stories, which makes the trip totally worth it.

I just start updating again, and I go and miss a Saturday post. Can you believe it's because we've been incredibly busy? Yup, like everyone else, we've had something to do almost every night.

Midquarter has already come and gone. This means, lots of grading at home. Let me tell you, I hate grading. It's one of the reasons I wanted to be a special reading teacher, and not a regular classroom teacher. This year, I'm back in the regular classroom two hours a day. So, a bit of grading. Luckily, NFL Replay gets me through it. Also, I have some"help" from Moon, the cat, as you can see above.

NERD ALERT: I dusted my Transformers, and moved them around a bit. Check out the view over my monitor. I have the best man-cave of all time. Well, the best man-cave you can afford on a teacher's salary of all time, at least.


Deana has been the PTA All-Star. She was the master planner for the first PTA Movie Night at Halfway. Kung Fu Panda, on the projector, in the gym, with popcorn, soda, candy, the whole nine yards. It was a huge success and over 100 people showed up! All the proceeds went to help some needy families from the school district this winter. Bravo, my lovely wife!

Brandon's making all A's. He's also working on the latest Drama club production. He's Young Ebeneezer Scrooge, which is about the perfect role for him, the way he is with saving money. Connor is doing awesome at school, particularly in math. He's also becoming quite the artist. I'll try to get some scans up of his super heroes. No clue why he loves drawing super heroes so much...

This week seemed to go on and on forever. It started off well, but went south pretty quickly.

First of all, last weekend, the hard drive on our satellite receiver went out. There go all our recordings and the ability to pause and rewind live TV. I could live with that, but when the replacement was on its way, it stopped working entirely. No satellite at all, period. Luckily I have an antenna for over the air HD anyway, so at least we could watch local channels. I'd really like to have had CNN for election night, though!

Speaking of Tuesday, ours was pretty lousy. Deana had a real scare at school, with tremendous pain in her arm and back, and numbness and elevated blood pressure as well. We left as soon as we could and got her to the doctor. He ruled out heart attack and stroke first, and let me tell you, that was terrifying, for me. Deana was hurting so bad she cried when the doc had her lay down on her back. This is the woman who took 4 Tylenol when she birthed Connor! After blood work, X-rays, and an EKG, all he found was pneumonia. Deana has been on antibiotics and taking pain medicine as she needs it all week, but she's still run down. She went back to school Thursday and I think it was too much for her. I'm glad she took yesterday off, for sure. Hopefully she'll recover quickly.

Back to Tuesday, the Basketball Dinner was a success, though we were late due to being at the doctor's. We had a very good turnout, the kids (and adults) had a great time, and Brandon was hilarious when he gave out the awards.


Wednesday was a real headache. The replacement satellite receiver arrived, and swapping it out was a huge pain. Brandon and I both whacked our heads several times on our wall-mounted speakers. It looks like a rat's nest behind our TV, what with all the cords and wires running everywhere. Whoever invents wireless power will be very, very rich. Tesla may have been onto something, right?

Flu shots were this week, too. The big jock himself, Brandon, got dizzy and had to stay in the nurse's office for a while. I walked him back to class and told the kids to call him "Dizzy McFainterson" for the rest of the day. Connor was far braver, and as a result he got to open a new Power Rangers toy. Of course, he arranged it with some others "to put on the internet", so here is a picture.


The weekend, in contrast to the rest of the week, has been rather relaxing. I'm enjoying the cooler temperatures and the fall colors. Our yard is covered in golden yellow leaves, and Deana's mums are gorgeous. Lots of Xbox and even the Wii today. We're heading to a birthday party soon, at the movie theater, and watching Madagascar 2 afterward. I'll talk to you later, right now I've got to move it, move it...

Last night Brandon had several friends over for a Halloween Party. Connor was so excited too, and cute as he could be in his Bumblebee costume. (We had to alter a store bought one that was too small!) All sorts of cool costumes, as you can see by the slideshow above. Guitar Hero World Tour was a big hit with the kids. Not as bit of a hit was the Creepy Castle decorating contest. Let's just say 14 and 15 year old boys aren't really concerned with being neat with orange and black icing. I kid you not, there was orange icing on our bathmat this morning.

I'm thinking about updating here more. I'm not sure Blogger is robust enough for what I'd like to do. In any event, here are some pictures from a costume party we went to last night! I had most of the costume stuff already, thanks to my awesome Transformers collection. We really had fun with Deana's getup. She has little purple spiders in her hair, and I did the spiderweb pattern on her face. I knew drawing all those Spider-Man doodles as a kid would come in handy some day!