I think I blew Black Friday

On that most peculiar of American holidays, Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), I probably did not make the most of my opportunities. When the kids were little, I would head out early in the morning to our favorite toy store and fill my cart with all sorts of great stuff at 25% to 50% off, as they say. This year, I only needed one thing: A Fisher-Price Digital Camera for kids. I had to take Kathy to work that morning, so I didn’t make the 5:00 a.m. opening of Toys R Us. I rolled into the parking lot at 7:30.

There was a line snaking along the main aisles from the front of the store to I’m not sure where. I asked one guy if he was on line for the checkout and he said, “Yes. Impressive, isn’t it?” I asked a worker if she knew where the camera might be, and she said they had had one left when the store opened. So I followed this girl with an impossibly small butt (see why I don’t like the kids reading this?) to a shelf bereft of Fisher-Price Digital Cameras. All that was left was a sign with a price on it that was ten dollars less than the advertised price.

I got out of there, giving thanks that I didn’t have to while away my morning on that line. Later that night I ordered one on line for about thirty dollars more than the toy store wanted. At least it’s on its way. I hope. They were disappearing literally before my eyes. For instance, I consulted with Kathy on a Walmart price, only to find it suddenly out of stock when I tried to order it. Fisher Price is still advertising it on TV, the devils!

After poring over the ads from the Thanksgiving Day paper, there was really not much I was inspired to buy, so I decided to call SanDisk to fight over an Extreme III SD card that had failed in my camera. All that was on the card were about fifty photos from a reception in Chicago. If they were lost, it wouldn’t be a tragedy.

I have to say the support people at SanDisk are really very nice. One guy told me to buy a card reader, so I did and called back on Friday. The computer wouldn’t even recognize the card reader when the faulty SD card was installed, though it worked fine with another card I bought as a back up. I even offered to trade down to a slower card, but the woman on the phone on Friday said they couldn’t do that, but she would be happy to get me another Extreme III card if I sent back the bad one. Good enough.

The weather has been terrific here, with great sunny days and temperatures in the 60’s (15 to our European readers), so I washed the car, then went out to store advertising memory cards for about fifteen dollars. I bought another SanDisk 1 gig SD card, but just a regular old one—nothing fancy. That afternoon I realized for the first time that my PDA takes SD cards—woo hoo—I’ll have to explore that further.

One more foray into retail took me to Sams Club where I bought a big bottle of Advil and picked up some photos they had developed for me.

So I really did try to get into the spirit of Black Friday, but this year I contributed very little to retail’s bottom line. You just wait till after the New Year—then you’ll really see some spending!

Parish Party

This afternoon we closed out our parish’s 75th anniversary with a Mass celebrated by a bishop and then a dinner dance at a church hall a few blocks away. The Mass was fun, though the bishop wasn’t using the microphone very effectively. You could hardly hear him.

I came home and quickly changed into my tux and drove over there. People were quite impressed with my formal wear, if I do say myself. The bartender, woman in her early thirties maybe, was talking to a couple of us about getting dressed up, and told us that she had worn some things she didn’t want to wear—like a couple of wedding dresses!

My neighbor had done a lot of work to plan the event, and then she couldn’t even attend her own party because she works at another church that was celebrating their 50th anniversary and so she had to be there instead of with us. She just called to see how everything had gone.

The food was kind of industrial roast beef, mass produced chicken marsala—that sort of thing. What counted was seeing all the people there. We sold 344 tickets, so the place was packed. I didn’t know everyone there, but I had brought my camera so I wandered around and took pictures of my friends as I found them in the room. I’ve known some of them for thirty years, others for only a few months. Some I met during renewal weekends back in the 70’s, others I know from working on various projects and with different groups.

The funny thing is that more people know me just because I do the readings at church. They’ll call me by name and I won’t know who they are at all. There are people I’ve seen for years and years but whose names I’ve never learned. We have a photo album of parish members coming out in a few months and perhaps I’ll finally figure out who all these people are.

Ironically, a group of us who are leaders in the parish and very active in several groups were gathered around one table in the corner talking about our feelings about our parish’s direction or lack thereof. Every one of us confessed that we are close to leaving this parish and looking for another. The pastor doesn’t support us from the pulpit, and we have the feeling that he would just as soon see the parish close as not. Many parishes will be combined with others because of declining attendance and membership. We could be one of those. We wonder if he knows something we don’t. As we got ready to head home, we said let’s all go to the same place, so at least we’ll know someone in the new parish.

A Grownup week

This was a busy week. Monday was a Social Justice meeting, Wednesday was packing food boxes for Thanksgiving, Thursday and Friday I was in Chicago for a conference, Saturday we delivered the food boxes to families in the parish, and Sunday (today) is the closing Mass for our parish’s 75th anniversary celebration where I will do the readings, and then I’ll put on my tux and be the MC at the closing dinner dance this afternoon.

We have never done the food boxes on Saturday before, but we couldn’t do it today with all the other festivities going on. Saturday would have been fine, but it’s the day that funerals are conducted upstairs in the church. We work in the downstairs church and it can get noisy. This Saturday the parking lot was packed for the funeral of an eighteen year old college football player from our town who died suddenly this week. Knowing it would be an emotional day for the people upstairs, I told everyone to use their “inside voices”, and even to whisper to ensure we wouldn’t be a distraction for the mourners. I think it worked pretty well.

Thursday I flew to Chicago for the Recruiting Trends conference, where we learn what’s happening in college recruiting for the next year. I had executive board meetings all day, and then a reception that evening. It was good to see my friends again, though I am feeling a little burned out with the work of the organization. I took lots of great photos (if I do say so myself) at the reception and then the next day, my digital camera said “This card cannot be used”. I have to call the company to find out what that means. I hope I can recover those images. I purposely bought the best card on the market to prevent just this problem.

Friday we listened to the presenter talk about recruiting trends, had a nice lunch, and then went to a couple of workshops in the afternoon. The former director at my school was there to do a session and I went to his. It turned out to be very worthwhile.

I used Midway airport for this trip, because it’s a little smaller than O’Hare. I decided to take the train for two dollars instead of a forty dollar taxi. Both going in and going out, the hotel gave me bad directions, but I kept checking with other riders who straightened me out about transferring and crossing to the other platform—things the concierge had neglected to mention. I gave myself plenty of time to get lost and made it to the airport with time to spare.

After clearing security, I noticed these rocking chairs along the passage to the gate. They were ladder back rockers, colorfully decorated with tags on them telling who had done the work. I wasn’t sure you were even allowed to sit in them, they looked so nice, but then I realized that that’s what they were there for. So I bought a sandwich and found an empty one and had a nice relaxing time, listening to my iPod and writing a newsletter article. How civilized. It got me away from the cell phone blabbers and the crowded gate area. I loved it.

Keep 'em coming

I just got word that another college has adopted the textbook I wrote! Woo-hoo! That's a whopping two!

Knee-sies

It’s fun to play knee-sies under the table. Could lead to something else.

This week, though, my knee was not up to it. You see, forty years ago I wrecked it playing basketball. We were in the high school gym after school. I went up for a rebound (and got it, thank you very much), came down and heard “Snap!” “Snap!” and then I fell into the deepest hole of pain I had ever experienced, rolling around on the hardwood floor, clutching my ruined joint.

It was ten years later that I finally had surgery, and every now and then it acts up. Thus, I found myself in the hands of a very cute orthopedic doctor, the daughter of someone I know from work of all things, the other day.

As I was sitting in the thankfully empty waiting room filling out forms, Jen the nurse came to get me. As I hobbled slowly to the door, she said, “I would ask you how you’re doing, but you don’t look so hot.” Then she recanted, saying, “Well, I mean you look hot, but…” Very funny. Then in the examining room, she said I’d have to put on the party pants so the doctor could check me out. The party pants turned out to be a one-size-fits-all set of culottes, in which even Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jennifer Aniston would look ridiculous.

I shuffled down the hall for x-rays in my attractive outfit, wondering where the hidden cameras might be. I’m sure the staff videos these forays for their Christmas parties.

In the end the cute doctor slipped a needle in my knee for a cortisone shot and sent me on my way. I’ve always been suspicious of cortisone, wondering if it did any good. After all, you don’t get a rush from it. They even tell you in the brochure to expect that you will feel worse before you feel better. I now know that it works quietly in the background and darned if the swelling hasn’t gone down and the pain subsided.

These past two weeks I’ve been afraid that the doctor would tell me it was time for a knee replacement. The x-rays showed that there has been little change in the bits and pieces in my misshapen joint, so that was something of a relief. Replacements only last maybe twelve years or so, depending on your lifestyle, so I wasn’t looking forward to perhaps having to go through the process twice in a lifetime. The doctor said it’s really up to me as to when they would replace my natural born knee with the Lee Majors model. When I can’t stand it anymore, they’ll do it.

I’m not up for a game of knee-sies just yet, but maybe next week. For now, I delight in the prospect of climbing stairs, walking the dog, and—dare I say it—standing upright for minutes at a time.

Mom!

You never think about your parents having sex. Somehow you got here, but you don’t really think about how that happened. Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of my mother’s passing. I rarely dream of her, but last night I did. In the dream, my father was a salesman, kind of like he was in life. He had just closed a big deal in a town where no one thought he could. His sale was like the Browns winning in Pittsburgh. My mother was telling me about it. She had long white wavy hair, was dressed in a white gown, and looked beautiful. Not movie star beautiful, but rather lovely as my family is lovely. Our own features made her so. She was talking about how happy they were, and remarked, with a sly grin, “And I worked really hard last night!”

The Silly Season

As we approach D-Day, zero hour—election day, it is clear that we are in the silly season. We are being bombarded by commercials claiming and counter-claiming, getting dirtier and dirtier every day. If your opponent accuses you of something , even in the final hours, you come out with a counterattack. Whether or not these crazy commercials will affect the outcome on Tuesday remains to be seen. We do know that they are insulting our intelligence and annoying us to no end.

Examples of the latest weirdness:
- a “retired” police investigator (who looks to be about 35 years old, says she bought drugs from a candidate’s staffer. Said staff member was not fired, but instead promoted.

- Wife of one candidate came on to say shame on the other guy who was persecuting her husband.

- Rudy Giuliani, who is apparently “America’s Mayor”, came out in support of this positively dangerous gubernatorial candidate.

Apparently, every candidate has either voted for tax breaks or for tax increases; punished the little guys or rewarded the fat cats; will personally seek out and destroy the baddies or surrender the country to the terrorists.

Candidates have been accused of:
- bribery
- being soft on terrorism
- defaulting on government loans
- taking money from lobbyists and then voting for the lobbyists programs (gasp!)

Our issues include constitutional amendments to raise minimum wage, allow slot machines in the state and ban smoking in public areas. I think a constitutional amendment is an awfully big sledge hammer to bring to the party, since such things are harder to change than regular old laws. A constitution is supposed to be a set of principles, not specific bits of programs that should rather be legislated.

I plan to vote against the slot machines and against the smoking dealie, but the minimum wage ploy bothers me. I favor raising the minimum wage, but darn it, a full fledged amendment—I’m not sure that’s the way to do it.

It will be nice to get back to erectile dysfunction, depression, sleep disorders, energy saving home improvements, money saving car insurance, and all those other things that we are supposed to care about.
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In other news, I blew out my knee this week. On Monday, my left leg was cramped such that I couldn’t straighten it. After walking around on it like that for two days, I literally couldn’t walk on Wednesday, and wound up missing two days of work: one because I was really in bad shape, and another because Kathy made me stay home, though I felt well enough to go. Will I rest this weekend? Probably not. Gotta see the ortho guy soon to see what, if anything, he wants to do.

Oh-I ordered a new cabinet to hold my CD’s and such, and I’d like to put it together this weekend. Haven’t even opened the boxes yet. It’s got doors on both sides and sits on a spinner. It’s oak veneer and about five feet tall. Holds 500 CD’s and tons of DVD’s and videotapes. Two hundred dollars online, so it better be good. Kathy approved this purchase, in case you were thinking I went crazy on my own.