Uber Visitor and Black Friday

Here are some pictures of Claire, who is staying with us at the moment. We have effectively kidnapped her and are making her do many households tasks, such as baking pumpkin pie and babysitting.


To keep herself trim Claire is observing a strict diet where no more than the tiniest morsel of pudding may be consumed in any one sitting.
Most of these pictures are taken with Claire's camera which we've raided for the blog.

Here are some pictures of us at the park on thanksgiving.


The turkey cooked on the BBQ came out as the best turkey we've ever had!
And the pumpkin pie was way better than it sounds, Andy even preferred it to apple pie.
And here is Dan making the pastry for the pie.

Black Friday

This morning I got a call from work at 5:30 asking if I could come in because some reporting wasn't working and today is BLACK FRIDAY. This is the single busiest shopping day of the year in the US, loads of companies put on insane deals and people camp out in the sub-zero temperatures to get to the bargains. Last year one of the BestBuy stores sold 25 50" Panasonic plasma TVs for $10 each!

So I got to work and phoned Sri, the guy who put the reports together, luckily he was in Vegas and hadn't gone to bed yet so he was able to help sort it out. Brian is the other person who was in helping and he had run out of fuel in the dodgiest part of Minneapolis at midnight the night before, had to walk home and then cycle back with the dregs of the fuel he had in the garage then wait this morning for the petrol station to open. So overall it wasn't the best start to the day - especially as Andy was not best pleased (to say the least) that I was called up so early. Her wrath was really directed at BestBuy but I was the lucky vitriol conduit.

On the plus side we decided to take the children to the Holidazzle parade. This is one of those things you do 'for the kids' that the kids don't really want to do but you feel they should. It involves a load of lit up floats trundling through the streets of Minneapolis with lines of watching children crying with the cold.

And here is some footage of the kids mucking about in the front room.

And at the mall of America