Black Friday.
Meh.
I got some of the household stuff during the week because of the early Black Friday sales that Amazon did, but this year's Black Friday sales for most places I would be interested in or following was...lackluster at best, to be honest. Columbia thinks $70 is a good Black Friday deal for a jacket when I got two very warm, nice fleece jackets from them months ago for $20 each. Old Navy had a fair amount of stuff I was at best only vaguely interested in, but nothing I needed. Walmart and Best Buy had good deals on things that I had no desire whatsoever to own. Macy's had some good deep discounts on home and bedding items, but meh. Woot? Didn't even look. I used to love ThinkGeek's Black Friday sales, but they haven't even existed as a standalone company in years. Years.
Daisy, surprisingly, found some of the best Black Friday deals this year -- including a ton of cat stuff from Chewy and PetSmart (including a veritable mountain of litter), and various items on Amazon that she was interested in. I myself found a few things on Amazon but nothing to really write home about, and certainly nothing to use as gifts. I ran down my list to Daisy -- including things like a pair of shoes, fabric softener, Lenny & Larry's cookies, generic DayQuil, and cat treats -- and she found all of them mind-numbingly reasonable.
The only other things I got during Black Friday sales were more self-indulgent. I got four new pairs of glasses from my glasses website as they were doing a "20% off on all glasses over $10" sale, and we needed to burn some of our FSA dollars before the end of the year. I also ordered some vapes from my vape supplier as their deal gave me a $50 off my final order price coupon.
That's it. I am a man of few needs or wants these days. Twenty years ago, if I had access to the salary I do now, I would've blown a large amount of money on increasingly ludicrous items and I wouldn't have had much of a conscience about it. Today? Not so much. I'm old, I have joint and muscle pains and thick glasses, and most of my "disposable income" goes to keeping the cats as healthy and comfortable as possible. I'm such a dork.
Pete has greatly improved; he is back to eating normal, if not large, amounts of food and drinking his normal amounts of water. He had diarrhea this morning, per Daisy, but this evening had some very substantial solid shits -- so we're hoping he's on the mend and that the medicine is working. He seems far more lively and mobile than he has in a week or so, even if he's pretty wobbly due to age and muscle loss. I am comfortable enough in saying that, at this juncture, he appears to be once again out of the woods for now. Again, any or all of this could change tomorrow, but right now? He's fine. He has spent a good chunk of the weekend snuggling up to us and to the other household cats, primarily Gary/Empress/Charlie, who are all his snuggle buddies and the cats he will seek out to go find and cuddle with, but also the ones who will curl up with him while he sleeps.
All of this is also good because, well, the weatherpeople weren't kidding about the snowstorm.
Friday morning -- as I do almost every Black Friday, if I'm home -- I watched the Nebraska vs. Iowa game. Am I a fan of either team? No, not really. I do confess that I own a Nebraska Huskers hoodie, primarily because I bought it within a few weeks of marrying Daisy and moving up here, and felt like I needed it to fit in. It has since, strangely, become one of my most prized possessions and one of the five or ten oldest clothing items I own. It is old, faded, and worn, but it is incredibly comfortable and has held up remarkably well over the years.
Anyway, I digress.
The game is usually a daytime game, and is generally a daytime game that starts at 11am. Yes, local time, 11am Central. I didn't turn it on this year until it was nearly halftime, only to find in the broadcast that it was already snowing in Lincoln.
This does not bode well, I thought.
I ate Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch and dozed off in my chair for a couple of hours. When I awoke, it was nearly dark, and the snow had started here in Omaha -- forming a light dusting in the grass and on structures, but nothing yet on the roads or our street.
It was a snow that would not stop for nearly 24 hours.
By the time we awoke, sometime shortly before noon on Saturday, there were a few inches on the ground and coating everything. While we had gotten snow earlier in the month, on November 9, we got our first measurable snowfall in this storm. Interestingly enough, it was November 29 last year when we got the first measurable snowfall too.
Because we knew we'd be snowed in, and because we no longer really had to worry about Pete for the moment, we took the day to focus on ourselves. Daisy cooked breakfast and we finished season 5, part 1 of Stranger Things, which we'd started on Wednesday. We then attempted to get Christmas photos of the cats:
These were the three best ones, in my opinion -- Emmy, Gary, Mable and Pete.
Photos of Hank and Charlie, while taken, didn't really come out that well in my opinion. I'm going to try to redo their photos over the course of the next few weeks, and see if I can get better angles and lighting on all of the cats. I also desperately want to get side-by-side photos of the double trouble boys with both of them in the hats and scarves looking into the camera (similar to Gary's photo above), but I don't know how theoretically possible that will be. Daisy thinks that will be a near-impossible shot. She's likely right.
"It's not like we just have one shot at this," I said. "It's not Christmas yet; we've got weeks to try to get perfect photos of the kids."
Which is true; it's not school picture day, or an Olan Mills or JCPenney photo studio and it's no longer 1990; we can take thousands of photos every day if we want to because we all have camera phones now with good quality cameras. I have trouble getting out of the "everything has to be perfect in one sitting" concept as I am a perfectionist at heart, and I'm sure my dash of autism has something to do with that.
Anyway.
After that, the snow had stopped (thankfully) and we went out to shovel the driveway and walks, which had about 3-4 inches on them when all had been said and done. We made the tactical error to let ourselves run out of rock salt/ice melt, and as some of the snow had come down as little ice pellets, that made it much more difficult to clear.
I didn't think I'd be shoveling snow in November, but here we are.
We had everything cleared off, more or less, in about forty minutes. It was cold (it still is cold), and we were in our heavy coats. Daisy used the electric snow shovel and I used the normal one. The amount of snow was riiiiight on the cusp of needing to be shoveled versus not needing it because of city statutes -- I think the law in Omaha is if it's more than three inches, it needs to be cleared from walks and driveways within city limits. This was brushing up against that, and while I didn't want to do it, we are supposed to get a bit more snow on Monday and we both have to be out and about multiple days this coming week, for reasons I'll get to later. So we basically needed to get it done and be done with it.
After that, we had a quiet dinner and some nice, peaceful bonding time with the cats before eventually coming upstairs. Daisy showered and went to bed, and I was likely awake for another two hours or so before I had to gently remove Hank from my room -- where he had been sleeping very hard -- and I passed out in my chair. It wasn't my intention to pass out in my chair, but that's where it happened.
When I awoke, the temperature was under 20 and it was daylight again. I'd slept for almost seven hours straight, which revitalized me enough to where I feel that I've had ample sleep before needing to return to work tonight.
When we went downstairs, we found that Pete had shit on the floor.
Well, at least it was a possibility that it was Pete. When I picked it up with a towel and cleaned the carpet, it was warm -- and Pete was very clearly out like a light on the couch and had been for some time. It was behind my work chair, and it was deliberate -- as in, it wasn't a little turd that would've fallen off one of the cats, it was a full pile. Solid, a little goopy, but solid. Not diarrhea, but we also know Pete had taken a good solid shit last night in the pan, so...we don't know.
Look, I'm aware you don't need to know about this, nor do you particularly care. I just found it odd.
Shortly after we went downstairs I gave Pete his pills and Churus and he ate them normally...and then he went to the pan and peed normally. So it's not like he'd forgotten where the pan was. I know he has his senior moments, but none of those moments have ever involved him just straight up shitting on the floor, so who knows.
However, this was a thing that Maggie used to do. And Maggie also suffered through and eventually succumbed to kidney failure. So...I mean...
It is what it is. Pete still seems mostly fine and mostly normal. I told Daisy as long as we can keep him happy and healthy, let it ride. It won't take forever. It is likely a much shorter window of time than we think it is now, whether he was the phantom shitter or not. I'll keep an eye on him over the next few nights while I'm working, but I expect his end to come before Christmas. As I've mentioned before, I will be shocked if he lasts longer than that.
Anyway, moving onward...
I have not yet sent any of the Christmas cards. They've all been done, sealed, stamped and addressed since Thursday morning, but they haven't been sent yet. This is mostly because of the snowstorm; I'm not sitting cards outside in the mailbox for them to get pummeled by the weather for a few days before they even get picked up -- those cards cost me far too much money to be careless with them.
At the same time I am disappointed in myself because I'm a few days behind in getting them into the mail. I have already lost the "first card battle" this year -- one of my friends from high school who now lives in Florida had her card arrive here in Omaha on Black Friday. I told her via Facebook that she won this year, and that it is considered unsporting to mail cards before Thanksgiving. Friendly ribbing, of course. I refuse to escalate my timeline next year; cards do not go out before Black Friday, and that's my hard and set rule I have for myself. This year, they'll start going out tomorrow -- Cyber Monday. To be fair, it's really only going to cause a one-day delay for most people in their delivery, and I am always one of the first people I know who starts sending them out. For some people I don't get cards until shortly before, and sometimes shortly after, the holiday itself.
So, finally, we have reached the end of the holiday weekend, and tomorrow is Cyber Monday. While Daisy was volunteering this afternoon, I -- purely by chance -- was able to basically finish Christmas shopping for her. I have not told her this yet and do not plan to; I'd like to keep her guessing and extend the ruse a bit longer. And, to be fair, I have only gotten her four things, with the other three being done weeks ago. I may get her a few other little things between now and Christmas, but if I don't -- or if I don't find anything else -- it's not a big deal at all and I'll be satisfied.
We've semi-finalized my birthday plans for this year -- after all, it is coming up in a short three weeks. Earlier this summer, Daisy and I jaunted down southward to Shadow Lake, one of the many suburbs of Omaha (I suppose, anyway) where they have a giant shopping center with far superior stores to what mainline Omaha has. The Burlington down there is great, and there's a giant Ross store and the only Torrid left in the immediate area, as well as many other places in a giant complex. It's not a mall, it's not a strip mall, it is a retail gated community of sorts. The only reason I knew it existed at all is because a few years back, when we were looking for Empress, we were looking at cats at the PetSmart there.
And you know me and the holiday season -- it's not the holidays without a shopping trip. Even if we don't really end up getting anything.
Herein also lies the larger problem, like the elephant in the room nobody talks about -- my birthday is five days before Christmas. My birthday, this year, is also on the last Saturday before Christmas.
It's going to be a retail nightmare. Everyone will be out shopping. If we do this, we do this knowing that it's going to be overwhelming and crazy everywhere we go. There will be no escape of it. It will likely be the busiest shopping day of the year, and doubling down on that...it's the only day we actually can do it. My birthday being on Saturday means that Daisy works until 9pm the night before, on Friday. It also means that I work the day after, on Sunday. Unless we wanted to do it a week or two in advance (I don't), my actual birthday is legitimately the only day it can be done before Christmas.
So I formulated a plan.
We get up very early -- like, Daisy sleeps fast on Friday night and we're both awake and mobile by 7am -- and we get down to Shadow Lake by 9am. We hit the stores we want to hit, methodically, and then pull out when we're done and get back north to Omaha by the early afternoon hours, where we go to the parents' and have my birthday dinner with them. It should still, at that point, be just us -- Daisy's sister and family from Denver will not have arrived in town yet -- and then we can return home hopefully by dark or a little thereafter to end the day.
Do I expect the plan to go this smoothly? Hell no. It'll be my birthday, and something always goes wrong around my birthday -- either the car will break down, Daisy or I will be forced to work, Pete will die (a new fear this year; happy birthday, Brandon -- here's a dead cat for you), or the weather will be horrifying. For example, the blue jay tattoo I eventually got in July 2023 was supposed to be my birthday tattoo in 2022, but on the day of my birthday we got a snowstorm and the temperature was single-digits cold, so that wasn't an option.
Alternate plan if we can't end up doing the above?
Well, uh, I don't have one yet. It's going to be a very situational thing. If Pete dies right before my birthday, for example, it's going to be hard to find some birthday mirth to pull out of my ass. And honestly, that has a very distinct possibility of happening. He's absolutely on borrowed time as it is; three more weeks may be all we get out of him.
So, onward, into December we go...
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