Black Friday Shopping

We are officially some of those people you see on TV who camp out all night at the chance to purchase "door buster" sales, pushing women and children into the bushes as we pour into the doors at 5am.
This camo covered chair was right behind us in line and actually had two women in it, huddled together.
AF and I slept on the sidewalk from 8:30pm until 5am to be one of the 20 people in line to get voucher to purchase a Toshiba laptop w/ 3-in-1 photo printer for $223! We thought we'd be there in plenty of time to be first, but much to our surprise, about 80 people beat us, getting there as early as 8am Thanksgiving Day. This blog would have a very bad ending if one of the recipients of a voucher hadn't scalped it to us for $50. So when Best Buy opened their doors at 5am, allowing groups of 25 in every 15 minutes, we had to get in another line inside waiting to redeem their voucher and check out. That's where we watched a group of people arguing with the manager and a police officer. They were then escorted, some in handcuffs, out of the store for selling vouchers! Somehow, one of the people thrown out who had, like us, purchased a voucher got involved in the argument and, not only was handcuffed in front of his wife, but had his voucher confiscated, and therefore lost his $50-100! We promptly kept very quiet about our voucher. When we finally left, it was daylight, around 7:30am.
You can faintly see the yellow Best Buy sign in the distance. I took the photo from our spot in line.
Our sleeping bags were under the "N" in Noble in the Barnes & Noble sign. Having held cups of hot chocolate against our faces to stay warm, used multiple port-a-johns at a construction site across the street, and slept on concrete for hours, we felt anything but "Noble".
Here are our sleeping bags, AF still buried in hers. We were adequately warm, but next year (IF the sales are as good as this year) , we'll bring chairs, a thermos of hot chocolate, and sleeping pads.
Fun distractions during the night:
10:30pm...An ABC-TV cameraman for WSET video taped us.
4:00am...Spirit FM pulled up in their van, three guys jumped out and passed out one shirt, two books, and a handful of bumper stickers. (They clearly either underestimated the crowd for that sale OR are severely underfunded.)
4:30am...Liberty Univ. students came out with free o.j. and Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Costume party, Part II, with video!!

Ok, here is the much anticipated lederhosen video. The funniest part is seeing AF fall out laughing. The clip is short (and sideways) but you'll get the point.

Paintball

I got a group of 11 people, mostly from church, to go play paintball last weekend. So exhilarating!! We had two guides for 4 hours and played our choice of four fields: fort in woods, dirt mounds and trenches, barrels and tubes, or air soft (inflatable pylons). Most of the time we divided into two teams and played last man standing. The last few games, when we were running low on paint, we played 1-on-1.

Everybody had such a good time and wants to do it again...except for a couple of the girls. Yes, it hurts to get shot and it can leave a nasty round bruise, but the trick is to wear several layers of heavy clothing.
I'm sure Taylor showed her bruise to her whole class. She yelped when she got it in the side, but later in the game, I got back at the shooter in the same exact place at close range.

I learned that some people either really can't shoot or they have a hidden agenda against you, as a "friend" on my team shot me four times in the back and said he was aiming at a guy to my left.


One funny side-effect of paintball that all the guys had in common Monday were soar thighs. We each thought we'd pulled something or "strained our quad", as I told AF (she said, "What's a quad?") Four days later and it still hurts to stand, bend, or put pressure on my thighs!

Taylor took all of these photos, except this one including her. Pretty good job, eh? She's interested in photography.

Costume Party '07

Here are the much anticipated pics of our costume party for Halloween '07. We had a blast and a lot of laughs. AF and I went as Hansel and Gretel, and Taylor was the evil witch who put us in the oven.
These pics are from my camera, but a friend will send me her camera's photos showing my full costume, including a little movie clip of my interpretive German dance.








Witchy woman (Dottie said it's hard to make Tate unattractive...even with makeup and a scary outfit!) For this picture, we kept telling her "don't smile...stop laughing!"












The bottom half of my lederhosen



















Funkmaster Jim




















Scary Taylor




















Safari Eli



















Josh as Michael Scott from "The Office"


















Brandon the Superhero and Mike the Con-Vick



















Becca as a ? and Jenn is a blind referee