The fax I received when we were testing to see if my fax service was working.

I got up on Friday and started looking at some of the deals online.  Which, there weren’t many of what I would consider deals.  There usually aren’t that great of deals.  A lot of the sales are lies (there were a lot of places advertising “specials” that were the same pricing I have seen normally), or something for really cheap that you wouldn’t normally buy in your right mind anyway.  My thought was I would probably buy some music on Amazon, which seemed to have the best deals anyway, and no lines!

Alas, while browsing I came upon a thread someone had started asking what the difference was between the Warcraft 3 battlechest and the World of Warcraft Battlechest.  I clicked on it to see if it was for real, and if anyone had given them an answer yet, and the last comment on the thread was stating that Circuit City had the WoW battlechest for $15.  It is normally priced at $40, comes with the first game and first expansion, 2 strategy guides (which are worthless), and a month free (which is about $15 in itself).

Funny how WoW is what made me decide to fight the crowds on Friday.

But even more interesting, was the fact that there weren’t really any crowds. We left at 12:30 (lunch time), and went to Chambersburg (thinking that would be the less crowded).  We went to Circuit City first.  I bought 3 copies of WoW - which I don’t really need - so if anyone wants to play, talk to me about it.  I just couldn’t pass up that good of a deal.  We ended up getting a bluray player for Joe’s mom.  Then we went over to Game Stop to kill some time, they had “buy two used games and get one free”.  Joe left with 4 games (on top of the one he bought at Circuit City for $9 - Dead Rising - and the two others he bought over the past 2 months).  Joe also got a new phone from the Sprint store, we went to Kohl’s, Target, Staples, back to Circuit City, and we ate at TGI Friday’s in the middle of the dinner rush - of which there was none.

No lines anywhere.  At Circuit City, we walked right up to the register every time.  And in my book, we probably got the best actual deals anywhere.

And I still got to order a couple of things from Amazon.

It was such a productive day, I only have my parents to buy presents for now. I might never ever be stupid enough to wake up at 3 in the morning to go out for a bunch of crap that no one wants except people who think they are getting a good deal. But going out in the middle of the day on Black Friday wasn’t so bad.  And it was very worth it.

We ended up going back out today to go to Sam’s to get our drinks, and again, not really many crowds.  We went to Hagerstown, a different Kohl’s, and even went over to JC Penney’s at the mall.

I was really unimpressed with all of the talk of how horrifying it is.  But I guess that’s the good thing about living around here.

sheila the peanut

once there was a peanut. his name was sheila. he had a friend who was an ape named abe (who was also friends with george of the jungle– but that’s a different story for another day).

sheila and abe lived happily on an iceberg somewhere in the middle of a pond in the southwestern corner of arkansas. there wasn’t much to eat on that iceberg, but abe would use sheila as bait to catch the fish that lived in the pond. then both would settle down and share a hearty meal and their own accounts of the events of the day.

one day, the fish weren’t biting, but abe was mighty hungry, and ate sheila.

from his stomache he could hear the peanut’s cries : “why did you eat me? you were supposed to be my friend! let me out and i will catch a fish for you!”

so the monkey thought and decided that a fish is probably a little more filling than a peanut, so he let him out.

sheila caught him a fish, as promised, and as abe began to cook it (careless in his hunger), the ice started to melt. abe got worried.

“what shall we do?” asked abe, “there is an excessively large hole in this iceberg and it is starting to sink!”

“i don’t care what YOU do…” said sheila, “i’m swimming to shore!” and he jumped off of the iceberg he had once known as “home.”

abe pondered the possibilities and jumped off too, thinking the peanut’s idea was probably a good one, but he had forgotten he couldn’t swim. he sank to the bottom, because that’s what monkeys do when they can’t swim- they sink.

of course, sheila swam to the shore, because when he had jumped into the water he had gone under once but immediately bobbed back up to the top because that’s what peanuts do- they float.

he felt sorry for his old friend and sort of missed him, but then he thought maybe it was a good thing anyway. he hopped off to find someplace to make his home (because everyone knows that’s how peanuts get anywhere important- they hop).

after a while he came upon a big place with lots of colorful plants and hills and odd creatures like he’d never seen before. he overheard some of the creatures speaking of “circus acts” and “clowns” and he wondered what those things were.

he looked up and saw a big grey rock with a long grey vine hanging off of it. sheila hopped over to it to take a nap in the shade (after all, it had been such a tiresome day). no sooner had he leaned himself against it, though, than the vine began to move and sheila felt as if he was being pulled into the air by some unseen force. “maybe i’m dead and this is what it feels like when your soul goes to heaven” he thought, but then he looked down and did not see his body slumped against the rock.

suddenly he entered the inside of the vine. this startled him, as it would startle any peanut in its right mind.

“what IS this? a rock that eats peanuts?” he shouted.

the “rock” spoke back, “no, i am an elephant and you are my food.”

that was that. the elephant swallowed him and ignored every word the peanut said because that’s what elephants do- they eat peanuts, not have conversations with them.

so that was the end of sheila.

the end.

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We have been - oh so lovingly - referring to the “it” growing in my belly as the “Dragon Baby” only because when I was supposedly 6 weeks, we got a picture in my weekly email notification that showed something that looked like a hunchback retarded dragon.

Well, I went in for my first appointment today and we thought I was 7.5 weeks along.  We did an ultrasound just to be sure since I have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, and boy were we wrong.  I am only at 5 weeks and 6 days according to the ultrasound.  Which means that I must have found out very early!

I am going back again on the 14th to confirm how far along I am.  But I am glad we did it today.  I got to see the heartbeat which was 90 bpm.  They said that when the heart first starts to form the heart rate is a lot slower.

Thanks to Kim, I am so excited about this I can hardly contain myself.  And that is not just the pregnant woman in me talking, either.  I love Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, and Neil Patrick Harris.  It’s free until Sunday at midnight!  The last episode is launched on Saturday.

Ah well.

So we came home on Sunday to start tearing apart our kitchen in preparation of the cabinets coming on Monday.

Joe started ripping up the floor Sunday night, he only spent 15 minutes on it before quitting.  Just a test run for the next day.  But still got pretty far within that short amount of time.

In these pictures the cabinets are missing their drawers, but the drawers didn’t have bottoms anyway, so this is pretty representative of what we have been dealing with for a kitchen for the past 3 years.

On Monday we really went to town tearing everything out.  It was a very productive day.

I think Joe was having a lot of fun with the crow bar.

We messed up the wall a little where one of the wall cabinets was hung.  But we need to build walls around those pipes, anyway.

The next day was spent building walls, priming, and painting trim.  Also, I had a little bit of a freak out when I found out that two wall cabinets we were going to be using for base cabinets had an arched design on the top (As seen in the picture below).  The wonderful man at Lowes who helped us place the order for the cabinets called the company, and they are going to mail us replacement doors.  We can keep the other doors to do whatever we want with.

Seen in this picture: The new walls built around the pipes, the new wall color, our new cabinets, and our beautiful new dishwasher.

Below is the wall where the oven and over-the-range microwave will go.  You can see the spice drawers to the left of the oven space.  There will also be a tile backsplash on the wall behind the oven.

Right now the countertops are being installed.  We still have so much more to do.  Even before we have a working kitchen again.  Before we can have the plumber come back to install the dishwasher, the sink, and the toilet in the attached bathroom, we need to lay the tile.  Which is going to be one of the longest tasks in the entire project.

Also, the subflooring for the tile makes me rather itchy.  I break out in a rash every time I touch it.  So that should be interesting.

But everything is so exciting.  There isn’t a ton more to do - just odds and ends, and the tiles, of course.