Life By Lindsey Rae

For Thanksgiving, Jerrod got me Cracker Barrel, which was pretty nice, because it's my favorite! hehe. Really. We brought it home, which was even better, because we didn't have to deal with all the people and could just hang out together and wear pajamas for dinner...or at least I could, since I didn't even have to go pick it up!

The weekend is over and I made out like a bandit with the sales. Nothing big and great; I mostly went to the drugstores and grocery stores and got a lot of free items with the sales. Actually, I profited on a lot of the things I bought, after I used coupons....In total, probably around $50-60. I mostly got a lot of hair and cosmetic products, soap, lotion, razors, chocolate bars, toothpaste, nail polish, cake mixes...those sorts of random things. I think in total, I got over $300.00 worth of free items and then got back nearly $130.00 in store reward dollars that are kind of like store coupons that can be used to buy any merchandise within the store....but expire...the unfortunate part. (The goal is to then take the store dollars and roll them into something else...by purchasing another item that will give you more rewards dollars. Only certain items do this that are special sales for the week or month. So, if they expire within 2 weeks to a month, and there is nothing that come up in that time, you end up not being able to roll them very well and not profit as much.) Anyway, anything I had to pay out of pocket (to cover tax on the free items or on the remaining balance on the nearly free items) I was able to pay with my gift cards that I had from store rewards for filling prescriptions at the pharmacy or by using previous rewards dollars that I'd saved up to use during the Thanksgiving/Black Friday sales.

I'm getting so sick of shopping! The problem is that I was sick of it before I started. But, what can I do? On top of the fact that there are things to get for Christmas, I also can't resist the fact that I now am aware of too many good deals and there is just too much things I know I can acquire for free or nearly free! I'd like to take advantage of that...it's nice to know you have extras of things you use so you don't have to buy it when you run out (and it's not on sale) and also, because I am hoping to donate some things to the food bank.
I read recently that the food bank is 80,000 lbs short on what they usually have or need to have or something like this. I don't know what it was exactly, but anyway, they need some donations.

But, I don't like going out in the traffic...and it's getting busy near my house, since we have the big retail area. And, I really don't like the customer service, or lack of it, that seems to be what you get at most places. I can only think of about 3 places that I actually feel they consistently have good service at. I feel like most places have more mean and grumpy people working there than usual right now! It's so frustrating to have to deal with that all the time. This makes a good argument for why a person should do their shopping online whenever possible.

Overall, it was a pretty uneventful holiday. We didn't really do any big dinner thing. We hadn't really planned anything and didn't get any invitations to anyone's house this year, which has been the case for me in all the years I have previously lived here. Although, we did go over to Reco's in the evening so Jerrod could help him set up some stereo stuff that he is selling to him and ate some of their leftovers.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, I did not realize that Americans took the holiday so seriously until I moved here. Of course we have Thanksgiving too, but in some ways I think that they made a bigger deal out of it than they do Christmas. At school, people would ask me if I was going home for Thanksgiving and when I would say no, that I was not planning on going all the way to Canada for a one day holiday, (which by the way happed more than a month ago in my country) they would be absolutely shocked.
Earlier in the day we went over to Providence and saw our house. Amazingly enough, it has been painted! Well, partially. The first layer. The trim has been put up and painted also. I think that next week the cabinets are supposed to be put in. Jerrod talked to the builder last week and he said they are still attempting to close in December.
It's so crazy to me, because every time I think about moving, I can't even imagine it. I feel like I have lived at this place forever and the idea of moving in less than a month is just really unfathomable. There is (almost literally) a million things to do before then. All the packing and organizing. I am hoping to downsize my stuff and go through and get rid of what I am not using, which will definitely be a project. Then there are all the art things and the daily music stuff, recording, etc., to keep up with. It's overwhelming to think of it. A person needs to pick and choose their battles, but it's hard to choose when they all seem necessary.


On Friday, I did get up and go do the Black Friday shopping thing. I didn't buy much of anything, but I got to the mall early enough to get a free $10 mall gift card. Actually, the stores were pretty dead, all things considering. Looked like a kind of normal day at first. However, I think the real evil is when you go to places like Best Buy and people are trying to snatch all those limited quantity big-ticket electronic items. Some of the other stores really don't do any better on their "biggest" sale than any other sale, in my opinion. I really wish everyone would just rebel against this whole early morning thing too. I mean, why can't they have a sale that starts at 10 am rather than 4 am? Wouldn't it just be better for us all?

Today we went on a drive down to Birmingham to pick up an eBay auction that Jerrod won last week. It's some high-end audio that was being sold on behalf of someone by SnappyAuctions and they had somewhat mislabeled it and were charging a huge shipping fee for it, so Jerrod ended up finding it and winning it for really cheap. He has some of the stuff already and is going to re-sell it. Since they wanted so much to ship it, we went to pick it up. It's about a 3 hour drive. We pretty much went there and then turned around and came home. We did stop in Franklin and did a little shopping and looking around in Cool Springs on the way home. Not that we can't do that anytime; it's only 30-40 minutes away, but we don't go over there a whole lot because it's normally out of the way for us. But, it wasn't coming back from Alabama.