black.friday

Sweet mary. My sister *j* and I tackled the mall today. It was a last minute decision, since she had recently been hinting that she wanted to sleep in today. She came back from thanksgiving dinner with me last night since I'd finally convinced someone to donate platelets with me. Go *j*!!! You're a star! When I set up the appointments, her main question was, "what time does that mean I have to get up?" We finally set them for 11am, thinking that would give us enough time to sleep a little late, but not waste the whole day watching movies from a reclining chair while our plasma was sucked out of our veins. Around 9pm on thursday, *j* decided that we should get up early to do some shopping. Not for other people mind you, but for ourselves. She had seen some adds, and some of the deals had interested her. The cambridge side galleria opened at 7am, and they have a best buy, sears, clothing stores, etc, so we decided to get up at 6am to make it there for opening. Then we checked out the website, and realized that some stores were opening at 5am. *j* decided that we needed to be there earlier, so we agreed to get up at 5am, and leave asap. After tossing in bed for a while, I finally fell asleep around 1am, only to be woken by my alarm, a very short four hours later. We got there a bit before six, and stopped by dunkin donuts for some bagels and coffee. We saw a line from best buy running the entire length of the mall. The metal screens were still down, so we assumed it wasn't yet open. (Later, we find out that it had opened at 5am, but there were so many people that they only let in some at a time. It was a riot.) We went to a few stores before tackling the best buy line, and by the time we get there, the line's only about a third the length of the mall. Once we're let in, we become part of the chaos. *j* wanted portable speakers for her iPod that were down to $40, so we headed straight for that section. After finding none left on the shelf, we lucked out and spotted a stash on a back shelf. She grabbed one of those, along with a $15 1 gig memory card, and we went upstairs to get in line. I made an impulse buy and grabbed a tivo. It was free (after rebate), and even though going with the comcast dvr makes more sense financially, this will be easier in the long run. The cable bill's not in my name, so I'd have to deal with paying *a* back instead of just paying the tivo subscription myself. After waiting in line for about an hour to pay, we went down to cvs to get some water. The apple store was right next door, and since *j's* nano was giving her problems, we stopped in to see if they could fix it. The guy ran some sort of test on it, and couldn't find a problem, but did see what she was talking about, so he gave her a new one. I tried to get him to give her one of the new colored ones, but he said no. Anyway...she was excited to get a brand new nano, so we were in good spirits despite our sleep deprivation. We hit several more stores (picking up a few presents for others too!) and then split a wrap from d'angelo's for "lunch" around 9:30. We got to children's a little early, but since *j* had never been there, she had to read through all the info first. I got hooked up first, and while they were working on her, my access pressure kept dropping (which just means the draw line couldn't get a strong enough blood flow) they messed around with the needle for a bit, without much luck- the alarm kept going off. Finally, one of the techs took all the tape off the needle to move it, and got great access pressure...for about a second. Since it wasn't taped down, once the pressure shot up, the needle shot out of my arm along with a bunch of blood. The blanket was all bloody, and there was a pool of blood on the hot pack. Nice. So I got to hang out with *j* while she donated. They were happy that I brought her, and even got a double product out of her since her platelet count is also high.
This blog entry is getting a little rambly I think, so I'll sum up the rest of our day. We got home, had a sandwich, went to target, *j* left, I went to best buy again, stopped by gap outlet and went home to set up my tivo. The fact that you have to hook the tivo up to either a wireless/wired internet connection or a phone jack kind of stunk, but I'm excited to be able to transfer tivod shows to my laptop and then burn them to dvd. Yippee!