So not only do we have our Christmas tree up early as well as a bevvy of presents already wrapped and waiting underneath, but you’ll see that we’ve also taken a few extra precautions to help ensure that our holiday spirit won’t end up in the jaws of one local puppy who seems to have a proclivity towards eating pretty much anything she comes in contact with that doesn’t end up eating her first…
The Cleo Protection Shield has now been successfully deployed – god help us all if it doesn’t hold!
Mind you, I didn’t actually go shopping during the midnight madness portion of Black Friday – my wife and her sister did, and both came back with bags up bags of stuff, but I don’t really have the patience to fight crowds to save 30% on whatever. Nonetheless, I did end up going out with my wife a couple of hours ago to hit up some places that she hadn’t gotten to earlier, and maybe it was just the stores that we chose, but … it seemed really hard to even tell what was actually on sale anymore.
And granted, I’m talking almost exclusively about movies and video games – I completely understand that most of the “big ticket” items were long gone before I moseyed on in at the stroke of 8:30pm – but whereas it just seems like in years past, places like Target and Walmart had big, bright signs depicting which items could be nabbed at ridiculous discounts, to me it almost seemed just as boring as any other regular shopping night around some of these places. Barnes & Noble was the best about it, as they still had items out on tables with big discount signs on them, but as for Walmart? I actually spent more time looking on my phone to see if I could decipher what was on sale because the display case itself didn’t give the slightest hint as to what I could score for a fraction of retail price!
I guess it just seems like in years past, Sara and I have been able to make our Black Friday PM movie & game run and score some cool additions to our collection from the leftovers, but whatever I did find looked like it belonged in the bargain bin anyways, and at the end of the night aside from a sweet Lego set that I scored for someone at 50% off from B&N, that was about the extent of Scott’s 2011 Black Friday Experience.
🙄
So we finally made the decision this week that for Christmas, we’re going to splurge and get Cleo her doggie door.
Well, technically Sara was already sold on the idea and I guess it took a while for me to balance the good with the bad of no more cleaning up dog crap and urine in the house with we might come home to find an animal who isn’t Cleo also running amok.
I’m still not crazy about the idea, but I’m definitely an anti-poop man, so here we are. Anyways, in preparations I suggested that we start having Cleo use the other side of our sliding door because that side sticks and it’d make sense not to open it as much, so we closed the left side of the door that’s usually left open about a foot for her to come and go and instead opened the right side.
The opening is literally like four feet away from where it used to be.
It seems pretty straightforward to me, but I guess Cleo’s still gonna need a little more time to get the hang of it…
You sure wouldn’t know from the look of our Thanksgiving smorgasbord this year that only three people live in this house, now would you?!
I think we actually had more dessert than we did dinner, but hey – play your strengths, am I right?
Thanksgiving 2011 was fun though – took the day off from writing to just hang around with Sara and her sister, put in many an hour playing 3-player mode of Super Mario Bros. Wii – which is pretty insane if you thought that two players had a tendency to jump on each other’s heads more than actually fight koopas and whatnot! I can’t even imagine what maxing out at four players would even be like – the system might just propel each random players into the nearest pits just to save a few steps…
Anyways, as the holiday slowly rolls to a close, here I am back at home a’blogging from the warmth and comfort of my couch whilst the ladies are out battling the crazies, a la Black Friday shopping … even though it’s technically still Thursday. Actually, you know – that kind of throws off the whole naming scheme if stores are gonna start opening late Thursday night instead of at midnight or later on Friday. Kind of an embarrassing omission, if you ask me, but since nobody did, well there you go.
Happy Thanksgiving! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve still got a lot of desserts that I have to eat before I can go to bed… 
I would be remiss if I didn’t share these two other links that I just recently discovered while I’m at it:
Random fun fact of the night – who knew that Robin Williams … you know, the super-famous actor and comedian extraordinaire … is also a gamer?!
Just how big of a gamer is he, you ask???
He named his daughter Zelda, as in Princess Zelda from The Legend of FREAKING Zelda!!!
I always thought he was a hilarious guy, but gotta say that his stock just went up even higher in my books…
(Also, just for the record – Skyward Sword looks awesome! Christmas list material this year, me thinks???)
Every since my sister got me one of those plush Angry Birds for my birthday, Cleo has always been a little jealous because as far as she’s concerned, anything and everything stuffed in our house belongs to her.
…and more specifically, belongs in her mouth…
Anyways, we were shopping at Walmart this evening and I came across this, so I decided that it was finally time that she had an Angry Bird of her very own…
Now it’s only fair to report that as of posting these photos roughly two hours after she was first introduced to Angry Bird, at this point he’s pretty much been reduced to an Angry Nose … which bizarrely enough I had to fish out of the toilet for her because I guess she thought it needed to take a bath? Anyways, I think it’s safe to say that she had fun, even if they only made each other’s acquaintance for a very short time…
P.S. If you need a soundtrack for the background while you’re looking back through Cleo’s time playing Angry Birds, you really can’t go wrong with this fun, little rendition by Pomplamoose:
I’m rather proud of the whimsical deal that I stumbled upon this evening. Mind you, it wasn’t quite as lucrative as the Toy Story 3/Blu-Ray deal that I honed in on last spring, but still…
Basically, it goes something like this – currently Disney Movie Rewards is running a promotion where if you buy select Muppet DVDs, you get a free ticket to go see The Muppets in the theater! Since I already know that we’re going anyways, I saw this as a convenient opportunity to pick up the remaining two seasons of The Muppet Show that I never got around to buying in the past for only ten bucks a piece:
And it could’ve gone even cheaper than that if I had A) ordered from Amazon (didn’t want to wait for shipping, but they listed both sets as $18.49 a piece), or instead bought one of the actual movies (only $13/each, but I already have them all…). Best forty bucks I’ve spent in a while! 😀
Sometimes when you’re trying to lose weight and you’re not having as much success as you would like, you have to take it wherever you can find it.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m trying this challenge where you work towards being able to do 100 push-ups in a row, and despite not exactly burning through my big, aggressive pre-holiday goal like I wanted to, I’m still trying to relish in the fact that a mere three weeks later I’m now able to do nearly 3x as many push-ups in a set as I could when I started! Fitocracy just implemented a new graphing feature that I think shows my progress pretty nicely:
When I first started this challenge at the beginning of the month and could barely squeeze out my initial 4, I couldn’t even imagine doing upward of 27 push-ups in a span of maybe 5 or 10 minutes, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, push-ups have always been a bane for me so I guess that makes this kind of progress a little extra-special for me. And just as you often hear fitness gurus telling people to weight in less and pay attention to other things like how clothes fit when they’re trying to lose weight, even though the numbers on my scale aren’t exactly doing as I would’ve hoped, it’s kind of tough to deny these numbers as proof that over the course of three weeks, my arms actually are getting stronger! 🙂
So Cleo and I were out on our nightly walk around the neighborhood, as we’re wont to do around this hour, and at one point during our journey we came across one of the most terrifying creatures this side of the swamp!
Now it’s kind of hard to make out in the picture because apparently iPhones suck for nighttime photography, but those beady, little eyes are attached to a possum … but not just any possum, mind you! This was the most gigantic, well-fed possum that I’ve ever seen – easily the size of a well-fed house cat, and unlike most other possums that we encounter who tend to flee once Cleo sights them and starts going nuts, instead Big Bertha here just sat on its perch and stared down at us menacingly, as if it was sizing up Cleo (or me!) for its next meal.
I got as close as I could for the picture, but was afraid to inch any closer for fear of spooking the thing into lunging down at us!
Also, I actually don’t think that Cleo noticed him sitting on top of the six foot tall wall, otherwise she would’ve gone nuts and it’d have been every dog and human for themselves…