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Sunday, November 7, 2010

The Day I Survived Wal-Mart Twice

If you've been reading my blog for more than 2 seconds, you know that I loathe going to Wal-Mart.  I will go once a year, though, usually if it's something for Christmas (but NEVER on Black Friday).  Holy teryaki, we went one year on 4th of July and that was bad enough.  Yesterday Wal-Mart was having an early Black Friday sale as Sears and Best Buy have also been doing.  I'd like to think this will lessen the craziness on the real BF, but I also am an eternal optimist.  According to the salesguy at Wal-Mart, they'll be having BF deals the next few Saturdays, too, until the real day.

So I got myself up at 6:40 yesterday morning, right after Jimmy had left to go golfing.  I also got up at 6:40 this morning, too, but that's because I'm a ding-dong and didn't adjust my clock.  Regardless, the sale started at 8 am, so I got there at 7:15 am and was about the 16th person in line.  I occupied the time by texting my mom and people watching.  There was an organized line, and the salesguy came around to ask what you wanted to get so he could keep a running inventory to let the people at the back of the line know if all of the items they were there for had been claimed yet.

Around 8:07 someone realized they were supposed to start the sale.  It moved really slow at this point.  30 minutes later it was my turn!  I can't tell you what I got because something I got is a Christmas present for my sister who would still read this post even if I told her not to... :)  Anyway, up at the register, which was not working right and kept requiring the manager's key (sigh), the register wasn't even recognizing the items that I was buying.  They made a list of all of our names and told us they'd call us to come back later to pay for and pick up the items.  In the meantime Jimmy and I went up to Colonial Downs for a horse race.  More on that in a minute.

I came home to a message so went again at 4 pm.  Ugh.  Of course the shift had changed and no one knew what I was talking about.  It was crowded and noisy, and ugh.  20 minutes later I had my BF purchase in hand.  A very good deal, for sure, but hopefully by next Saturday they'll have all the kinks worked out for everyone.  The sales listings for next Saturday should be on Walmart.com towards the end of this week.

Jimmy and I determined yesterday we are not horse race people.  I had bought a Groupon a few months ago to Colonial Downs.  Last Christmas we'd gone behind the scenes at Churchill Downs, so I thought it would be neat to see an actual horse race.  We were seated right by a window, so had a good view, not to mention there was a little flat screen tv at our table.  As part of the Groupon, we were each given $2 bets.  Now, let me mention we're not betting people.  The statistics next to each of the horses info in the book?  Might as well be Greek.  Jimmy doesn't want to deal with placing a bet, so gives me his $2 bet.  Soooooo... I pick the horse with the name I like the best.  Needless to say, in the race he was in, he and only one other horse (out of about 10, mind you), were the only ones who had never won a race.  Whoops.  Though, I do like to root for the underdog!  Who did I choose?  Tidewater Pretty Boy.  Highway, our dog, is a pretty boy.  We actually call him Snow White, but Pretty Boy is close.  Love him to death, but he's so much prissier than our female dog.  Except when it comes to rap music.  He loves him some Snoop Dogg.  We had a music channel on one day and Snoop Dogg came on.  Highway went crazy and barked through the whole thing and ran around excited.  Not sure what that's all about, but it was funny.

Back to the races, though, here are a few pictures of our day.  By the way, we left after the 5th betting race.  There were 14 races slated, and we'd already been there for 4 hours total (including the non-betting races).  Maybe had we made money on Pretty Boy, I might have been more interested, but there was too much of a time lag between the races.  Regardless, it was fun.  It was definitely something different to do on a Saturday than sit home and watch tv.

Oh, did I even need to mention Pretty Boy didn't win?  He was doing good until the last turn and then he fell way back and came in 6th.  Oh well.

Here are some pictures of our day at the races.

And a 3-D poodle sweater to round out the day. :)


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