Giving Thanks, Giving All My Money to Black Friday!

Happy Belated Thanksgiving All!

This weekend is always a busy one for my family, much more so than Christmas. We have Thanksgiving at our house, so Thursday morning is usually spent cleaning and setting up the table for the arrival of my Grandma and other random family members that show up from year to year. On Friday my sister and I get up early to go shopping. This has been a tradition that my mom, aunt and grandma started a LONG time ago and my sister and I started our own tradition about four years ago. We shop on our own, but meet mom, my aunt and grandma for lunch to catch a second wind. Saturday is our extended family Christmas party, this has been a tradition long before I was alive, we have about 40 people that gather the Saturday after Thanksgiving and this year was our turn to host. Sunday is defintely the day of rest, but by the time Sunday comes I have no energy to do anything anyway.

This year Thanksgiving was pretty laid back, just grandma and Justin joined us for dinner, so it was relatively small. Justin and I traveled over to his grandparent's house after dinner to have dessert with his parents, grandparents and aunts family. It was a nice day. Lots of food, lots of laughter and lots of shopping preparation.

Friday morning my sister and I got up at 3am to get ready to head out into the craziness that is known as Black Friday. We started at JCPennys which opened at 4am, we ran in grabbed a gift for mom that we knew we wanted and then jumped in line before booking it out of there in time to get in line across the street at Target. We pulled into the parking lot to see a group of people standing in front of the store and got out to find that a line was wrapped around to the back of the building. We ended up waiting in line for 45 minutes, and for someone who didn't bring a coat (because I didn't expect to be standing outside... I thought we would take longer at JCPennys) I have to say it was absolutely freezing. Not as bad as it could have been, but freezing none the less. When we got through the doors Laura (my sister) and I started running to the middle of the store where they had the LCD TVs that I wanted. There were no carts left, so I ended up dragging a 40 inch LCD Flatscreen throughout Target while trying to dodge all kinds of crazies. After a pretty short line, a wait for Laura to get through line (we ended up getting sperated because she had more to shop for and I wasn't about to drag that dang TV around the store to shop), a failed attempt to get the TV to fit into my sisters car, a call to Mom to have her come outside and help me carry the TV to my aunts car and another stint in the freezing cold waiting for mom, I got my TV!!!! Justin and I are forgoing Christmas presents this year so we are splitting the cost of this TV so we have a nice one to put in our house (whenever we get one). From there Laura and I did a lot more shopping that resulted in quite a few presents, a wedding band for me and complete exhaustion!

Saturday was the family party, and OH the drama that is involved with family parties. Honestly, I don't want to get into it because It's just too much to explain and will probably annoy me further.

So today I spent my time watching the Monk Marathon on USA and gluing the cork onto the back of my coasters. This was about all I had energy for today after the past 4 days, so at least I feel semi-accomplished.

I'll update in a little while about the house hunting. We've made some progress :)

The Hunt for a House Begins...

So we officially started the house hunt last week, this is the reason for my MIA status lately.

Apparently when I get a new "project" I obsess over it until my brain turns to mush, so I have literally done nothing but look for houses/condos online, in neighborhoods and exchange e-mails with my realtor for the past two weeks. We've seen a couple good houses, but nothing we would seriously put an offer on. We had one house that we were serious about until we saw it in the daylight, lol. It ended up needed WAY more work then originally thought. I took my dad to see it with me the day after Justin and I checked it out and the two of us spent a good two hours looking at every inch of the house. In the end there was just too much to fix and not enough funding/time for us to do it. It wasn't my dream neighborhood either, I would have been settling for a neighborhood I'm not crazy about, so I guess it's good my dad is meticulous and gave me the truth about the house.

Right now we're going back and forth between getting a house and condo. Here is the low down:
Condos are are much more updated, usually come with appliances, a little cheaper and don't require me to actually take care of outdoor things. The downside of condos: association fees and neighbors that are super close!
Houses in our price range (in our favored neighborhoods) are going to need quite a bit of work (we're talking more then paint and carpet) and we would most likely have to settle for an area that we aren't in love with. This scares me, as does being financially responsible for owning a house and taking care of the outside and any structural things that go wrong. I think (in the words of my mother) "the first couple years of marriage are hard enough, do you really want to be remodling a house at the same time?" um... NO I don't!

Moving on to other things...
BLACK FRIDAY IS FAST APPROACHING!
I have a love-hate relationship with black friday. One year I will love it, the next I will despise it and all the crazies that come along with it. I get anxiety in crowded places and that anxiety usually makes me crabby so me+no sleep+way too many people in one department store = crabby emily.
So I will usually decide the night before if I really want to make the effort to get up and chase down all the crazies for $10 off a DVD collection or a crock pot. The funny thing is, I usually end up shopping more for myself then anyone else, which is NOT the point of going out, but whatever. I checked out this years Target ad and have finally found a plan for completing my DVD collection before the "big move". Target is having AWESOME sales on DVD series, and this will be an excellent present for people to get me so when I move out, I will be able to take all my favorite shows with me. Over the years my mom, sister and I have collected a lot of TV series, but not all of them are mines, so they can't come with me. bummer. So this years Christmas list will be filled with seasons of The Office, Friends and Sex and the City. Love it!

So, I think last time I wrote, I promised some invitation mock-ups... well I'm still working on that. And by "working on that" I mean, I haven't started so leave me alone :P
That will be a Thanksgiving break project... hopefully.

This weekend is the Mary Kay party and New Moon date with Rachel. I'm super excited about it and will post some more info on what it is later. Maybe tomorrow.

So this will be all for now, gotta save something for tomorrow :)

Wish me luck on my house/condo hunt tomorrow, got 3 places to look at after work!