Thanks Has Been Given.

Now Playing -
Green  Christmas - by - The Barenaked Ladies

Life - 

Salt Lake City, Utah is a horrid place. I've decided that after two days of driving about and being generally lost or annoyed or generally perturbed by the residents and streets of the town and area. I'm also increasingly shocked and dismayed by the way the city is growing and becoming slummier and slummier as time passes.

We were in SLC for Thanksgiving, being held at my Brother-In-Law, Dylan's new house in one of the suburbs of SLC.  Apart from the traffic and my inability to navigate in towns with more than 70,000 people, however, it was  a great trip.

We brought teh boys with us, their first long car trip since we've gotten them, and the performed admirably! They didn't whine or complain, for the most part they just looked out the window or slept. Pooka did get a bit antsy a couple of times, but he quickly settled down.

Dylan and Cami have a nice house in a 'burbs style home, a split level walk up on a quiet street. It's very cozy and comfortable, and it was great fun spending more time with them, they're the part of the family that I've seen the least and it was nice to catch up.

The food was grand. We made a Pomegranate sipping punch and the stuffing, and each of the family made something else. Dylan cooked the turkey in a Dutch Oven designed for poultry and it turned out shockingly moist, almost melt in your mouth.  Apart from four separate trips to the grocery store, everything went off without a hitch. Our boys behaved themselves and were a hit with the people, who aren't accustomed to big dogs.

We had a chance to sleep in their camp trailer too, which was really good for us, we had our own space and we've been thinking about getting one some day, so it worked out perfect. We loved it, but in order to buy one, we would need to buy a pickup, which seems like an unneccesary expense. We'll probably end up sticking to a teardrop trailer or something the Element can pull.

All in all, it was a nice Thanksgiving. We had to leave around six that night so that I could work, and again, the boys were well-behaved on the ride home.

As I predicted, Walgreens had a terrible Black Friday. Between the mix of items and the lack of a finite hours of sale, when I left at 9am on Friday, we were already down $3,000 from the year before. Thanksgiving itself was slower than usual too. From what I saw, it looked like most people were only shopping for big ticket items, and were picking up a lot less impulse stuff than usual. I haven't been into the store since then, but I'd imagine a pretty poor showing.

It was kind of a pain working one graves shift in the middle of my days off, and Friday, was mostly a bust as far as getting anything done after work was concerned. We did head out to Home Depot with my mom to grab a Black Friday special, a dryer for $280, to replace the one that her mysterious destructive static field obliterated. Naturally, they only received nine of the dryers and were long out by the time we got there around three, but they were very cool about it. They have a deal where you can pay for it then and when it comes in, they'll deliver it for free to your house. The salesman was very friendly and competent and despite the busy store, took the time to find us the accessories that we would need too. Then they let us buy them at the same time. I was pretty damned impressed. I fell asleep in my chair reading around 7, and drifted in and out of consciousness after that. Beautiful weather that day too.

Writing - 

Not really anything here, and unfortunately, looking ahead at the coming weeks, something tells me that The Whispering Ferns is going to have to wait until January if I want to get anything done on it.