Thanksgiving was more or less the yoozsh, with a little give & take. The usual fam was there, with the addition of my cousins. Lots of food as usually, but we were missing one key thing: pumpkin cheesecake. Last year, we had 2 cause both Jacqueline and I brought one. This year, we both didn’t bring one because Caroline said she was going make one (we asked her when we were at her house for the Pacquiao fight), but she forgot to. She make cupcakes instead. They were good, but it just wasn’t the same at good ol’ pumpkin cheesecake. As sort of a consolation, Uncle Ernie brought a ton of oysters.

We played our usually poker game. I got knocked out first, but had to stick around cause I’m the all-time dealer (don’t really know why that is? really, dealing isn’t that hard.....). Edrick won, with Tj coming in 2nd. And what usually happens after our game is over, is that we go downstairs to get more food, and all the food is gone. But not this year. There was hella food still left over. Yah! for a 2nd round of food coma!

But the one thing different about this year’s Thanksgiving was Black Friday. After looking through all the ads, online & in print form, there really wasn’t anything that any of us wanted to line up for, at least nothing that was worth it to wait 4 hours in the cold for. Chris was looking for a 3D, I was looking for the tv Chris got last year (55” LED 120Hz) & a cheap SSD. But there weren’t any deals for those. The closest thing that I considered was a 1TB portable external HD & a 2TB desktop external HD that both Fry’s and Target had on sale for $70 each. A very good deal, but not worth lining up for, in my opinion. Like, if Fry’s had the tv I was looking for, I’d line up for that, and try to pick up the HD too, but the tv would the priority. But that wasn’t the case, so the 1st time in 4 or 5 years, I was asleep in bed at 2am on Black Friday. It felt hella weird, actually.

So later on in the day, I drove Jay & his mom to the Vacaville outlets. There was still a crazy amount of people there. Parking was horrendous. The line outside of Gucci was ridiculous! What recession, right? And the sales weren’t even that great, as some sales were only good till 12pm (since they opened at midnight....early bird gets the worm, I guess). I didn’t even buy anything. The one store I wanted to go, Puma, was on the other side of the street from where we parked, and they didn’t want to walk all the way over there, and trying to drive there and find parking again just would’ve been dumb. But it was all good. We stopped by the mall in Fairfield on the way home. They bought more stuff and I did more window shopping. I saw a jacket that I liked at Macy’s, but it was probably the only jacket not on sale. What are the odds, right? Then we had dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. The service was pretty bad & slow, but I love their wings so.

Oh, I did buy one thing on Black Friday. I found a cheap SSD, after rebate, on TigerDirect. I actually did more shopping on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday. On Monday, I bought the Back to the Future trilogy 25th anniversary edition blu-ray on Amazon and a bbq grill at Home Depot (website). My dad actually wanted the bbq grill on Black Friday, cause it was in their ad, but they had sold out at the store in Vallejo. I just happened to check online, and they still had it in stock, with free shipping, with 5% fatwallet cashback. Yah! for shopping!

Volunteering is awesome.

I found this event through OneBrick. This type of event was the reason I stumbled upon OneBrick about a year ago. Overall, the event was a whole lot better than I thought it was going to be. And it was fun, as well as fulfilling (as in I felt good for helping out).

There were a bunch of other volunteers that weren’t with OneBrick there too, so they divided us up to do different tasks. Some people helped in the kitchen (but the kitchen was small so not a lot of people could help in there), setup the dining area, walked around the neighbor passing out flyers about the event, and setup the clothes donation area. What did I do? I got stuck with the floral arrangements. WTF, right? Well, they received a truckload donation of miscellaneous flowers, which were bunched together in plastic, so my job was to take off all the plastic, while the others would actually place the flowers in vases and arrange them all pretty & stuff. I tried making a vase, but I obviously didn’t know what I was doing.

When we were done with that, they gathered all the volunteers together and we did some ice breakers / team building exercises, which were sorta fun. Then we prepared to serve the food. I volunteered to be one of the servers. It was setup like a buffet line, with us on one side serving to the people on the other side. The food we served was way better than I thought it was going to be. Like, in my head, I was thinking it’d be just turkey, mashed potatoes & gravy, and maybe a dinner roll. There was actually waaayyyy more than that, and it all looked really good (of course, all the food was donated).

So I served for maybe an hour and a half. It seemed to go by really slow, because they would only let soo many people in at a time (due to the size of the dining area; it wasn’t that big). So everything came in waves. And we were standing the whole time. But it was cool.

At the end of my shift, I really didn’t want to leave. I ended up staying maybe an hour longer. But I had to leave go to my family Thanksgiving dinner.

Note: my shift started at 8am, so I left the V a lil before 7am. I got there (in SF @ 7th & Howard) around 735am. Absoluetely NO traffic. It was soo awesome. There was no one on the roads. It was sorta creepy, like it would be something you’d see in a disaster movie after a mass evacuation or in a zombie movie right before all the zombie invasion.