It’s Thanksgiving in Frankfort! I am very thankful for getting to spend the holiday with my girls and that I have a new job that allows me to be here with everyone. Eight years at Citi we were very fortunate that I was able to work from home for occasions like this. I’ve lost that but now I get the both Thanksgiving and Black Friday off completely so instead of working from Frankfort for a little longer I do a few fewer days but really get the days off that I am here. No need to sign in and check on anything, at least not this year. We will see what next year brings.
This morning was the family sitting around in the kitchen, as we often do, and looking through the Black Friday deals. I think that most of American has turned to Thanksgiving being a day of shopping planning more than anything else. There is so much special shopping that happens just before, during and immediately following the holiday that it is impossible to ignore.
My Black Friday deals are from Steam. They have tons of awesome deals all week plus special lightning deals every eight hours. They are brilliant making you stay logged in continuously and checking the latest deals over and over again. I got a great haul of stuff at the beginning of the sale knocking out half of my extensive wishlist. I have a process for this stuff and I put things into my wishlist all year long knowing that there are going to be awesome sales. My ability to delay gratification is key here and really works in my favour. Because I can hold out knowing that things are in my wishlist and won’t be forgotten or missed, I can wait for the awesome sales.
My big scores at the beginning of the sale included nearly all of the Assassin’s Creed collection and Skyrim: Legendary Edition for myself. And Night of the Rabbit for Liesl and I. After this, my wishlist is down to just about six items and all are things that are pretty new and will easily wait for next year’s sales. I now have seventy four games in my Steam library! That is enough to keep me busy for a long, long time (that list includes Liesl’s and Dominica’s games too.)
Before three we packed up the kids and headed across town to Joe and Barb Tocco’s where we are celebrating Thanksgiving. Both girls spent the entire evening being very restless because they wanted to eat the cake that Dominica had baked (it was purple and pink so Liesl was going bonkers) and to open presents.
We had Thanksgiving dinner with the family, then more family came over to visit. Once the crowds had dispersed we sang Happy Birthday to Liesl and cut into the cake which was very good. Once the cake eating was done it was into the living room for the girls to open their presents. Because she is only two and could not handle Liesl getting presents and her not, Luciana got the Playmobil Advent Calendar that they were getting anyway wrapped up for her to open. That kept her happy. Good thinking Grammy.
Liesl got two Playmobil sets, Animal Clinic and the Asian Animal Park, from Dominica’s parents. Both girls are super excited about those. And from us she got the red Nintendo 2DS and Mario Kart 7. When she opened the 2DS she was very excited but we asked her if she knew what it was and she said “no.” LOL But she was excited nonetheless. We explained what it was and she was really interested then. She opened the game and knew immediately what Mario Kart was, as she has played it on the Wii previously. She was truly excited about that because she likes that game. I opened the 2DS for her and told her that I might need to charge first (which she is used to and understands immediately) but she looked at the 2DS and turned it on immediately all by herself and just started using it. Apparently this will be very easy for her to use.
It was pretty late when we got back to the house. Dominica set about putting together the Playmobil animal clinic for Liesl. Liesl is super excited, this was a perfect set for her. I got the 2DS battery run down, then plugged in to charge up for tomorrow and the latest software update applied.
I put in a bit of time getting SGL updated this evening. With some work tomorrow morning I think that we will be completely caught up after falling behind while in Disney World.