BLACK FRIDAY, AND NARY A SINGLE GRANDMA ATTACK. ALSO, IT ENDED WITH GINGER SNAPS PT. 2/2

For a recap of part one, scroll down and read part one. I'm not rehashing all that.

This is a continuation (obviously), written the same night.

Then we go to Kohl's, see some kids I knew before they were born--er, knew their parents--feel old because one is buying a house, and go to say hi to my little girl (my wife) before carrying on our day.

Lydia was running a register, and since the registers are roped off , we had to yell across at her.

"Hey, hottie, how much are you on the Doorbuster sale?" I have a pretty loud baritone, so a lot of people looked.

Her big blue eyes were shining, but she pretended to ignore us and keep ringing out, so Caleb, who is nearly as big as me, starts doing this dance that looks like Woody in Toy Story flipping around like an organ grinder's monkey, yelling, "I'm going to keep doing this until she talks to us," then starts pointing and says, "I know her! She knows me! I know her!"

So she finally talked with us real quick.

Off to Home Depot. Got my wrench set. Got my flashlights. I don't need flashlights. I have probably 20. But I have a serious flashlight problem, and they had a really nice 8 pack of LED's for 9 bucks. So now I have 28 flashlights. Of those, five are the headlamps. I only have 1 head. Little Joe will play in the dark with me, all the lights shut off in the apartment except for the headlamps, so that's another head. I still have not found the remaining three heads that would warrant me having 5 headlamps.

Two things about Home Depot totally rung true about Black Friday. The first was that we saw an Amish horse and buggy turning left on a busy street, with an orange Home Depot Homer bucket hanging off of it. Secondly, they had 60 Rayovac Max AA batteries for $9.99. That is an awesome price.

What was not awesome was the fact that a woman had parked her cart in front of the display and was throwing trays containing dozens of these 60-pack batteries into the cart. She refused to move when people asked politely. She looked like she was trying to shovel coal into the train engine fast enough to get the flux capacitor to a high enough speed to get Marty home.

Let's do the math. Dozens of 60-pack batteries, and she was just pushing two trays at a time into her cart. The woman had to have left that store with 674,000,000 batteries. Does anyone need that many batteries? If Connor McCleod of the clan Mcleod put light ropes on his sword so it lit up, and had it on all day long, he would still never us up all of the batteries this woman bought. And he can't die.

For the sake of my promise to not use vulgarity on here, I will refrain from actually saying what personal appliance(s) I told her she must be using all of those batteries in. If you think of something offensive, that's on you. I didn't say anything like what you're thinking.

From there we went to Gamestop, where they had a buy-two-get-one-free sale on the used games. Through some absolute trickery and confusion of numbers that I am at a loss to explain, I ended up with 46 dollars worth of used games, and I paid 8 bucks. Caleb ended up with 42 dollars worth of used games, and paid 26 bucks.

Then we went back to my place and played an XBOX 360 game that I already had. So that worked out well.

As we're stumbling down the apartment steps, we were both being loud, not remembering that even though we had four stores, it was still only 7 am.

I don't remember picking Lydia up from work, or then going to my mom's to get Little Joe. I remember turning out all the lights and playing with the flashlights with Little Joe.

I do not remember shopping, but I do remember I had to leave for Wal-Mart--AGAIN!!!--at about 10pm because we were down to one roll of toilet paper. And apparently I had the energy to decide to do our weekly grocery shopping, as well.

While I was there, I had to get Ginger Snaps. And here's why: the little bonde farmgirl, her boyfriend, and their friends were all from the same High School I went to (before they kind of half-kicked me out following my freshmen year), since we used to live in that country town. They were asking me if I knew teachers, and I knew some, but there were some they didn't know because they had retired.

One of those teachers, Mr. Borgis, would always slide Ginger Snaps across the table to me during home room. I hated them, but I'd eat one a day. I could stomach one, because he was funny and we used to rip on each other. He'd always say, "You ever eat these? They're great in milk."

I thought of that when I was buying milk.

So now here it is, 2:23 am. Hazy-Grayish Saturday (I never called it that before, but I'm starting now. Everything is hazy-gray), still not sleeping. Eating Ginger snaps.

They're still just as bad, even if you dunk them in milk.

Addendum: I'm returning the digital camcorder I bought at Target. It was just a front to buy Play-Doh anyway. And we still have more than 3/4 of the box of Ginger Snaps. Because they're still nasty.