Wordless Wednesday
Category Archives: Holidays
Black and Blue Friday
My 25 year old dryer and 15 year old washer were still running when Sears ran its Black Friday ad last year. Brand new, low water use, high efficiency, front loading, stackable washer-dryer pair for $579.98. Regular retail (does anyone pay regular retail for appliances?) price on those particular models was $1,399.98. “At least four per store” the ad said.
Key West has a very small store and it is an hour away. I figured four pairs would be the most they ever had.
Hmmm. I wonder if it is four pairs or four appliances? I didn’t want to get up at 0:dark:30 and drive 55 miles for something I didn’t absolutely need right then.
Why should I have expected any different? I called the store and the appliance department manager treated me like an annoyance.
I want a nap.
After the short wait programmed into the auto-attendant phone system, “Darrell” answered. I asked if he had the advertised washer and dryer in stock.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m in the shipping department.”
I asked the expected question about why a call to the major appliance department would be shunted to the shipping department.
“Because I’m the appliance manager but all my people are on the floor with customers.” Ahh, Sears.
Oddly, I was a customer.
Darrell spent about 10 minutes refusing to help me and asking for my phone number so “someone could call me back.” I do not respond well to stonewalling so I spent my part of those 10 minutes demanding that he treat me like a customer and give me the info I wanted. I got nowhere but I did leave my number with him.
He also refused to let me speak to his supervisor; he then refused to let me speak to the store manager when I asked to be transferred.
“You know,” I said near the end of the conversation, “if you had simply looked up whether you had the product in stock instead of being a dickweed (actually I probably said ‘instead of jerking me around’), you would have had a happy customer in me and would have had time to take care of two or even three other customers.”
I called the store back to speak to the Sears store manager. I had to leave my number on voice mail. I’m still waiting for that call back.
I need a nap.
OTOH, a saleslady named Ann did call me 45 minutes later.
“We had four pairs in stock,” she said. “I know we sold two right after the store opened but I think there are still two left.
Ann explained that they were giving customers a ticket that let them buy the appliances and that the sale rules said they could not do a telephone sale. Sort of no tickee no shirty, and you must be present to win. She put me on hold to check.
They did have two pairs left; Ann advised driving down right then. Key West is an hour from my little house but I loaded up and did just that.
The store sold one more pair while I was on the road. I got the last pair.
Ann tried twice to sell me a new pigtail and vent but I demurred. I wondered why anyone would buy either, since most retail appliances today are replacements.
“Our installers will not use an existing cord,” she said citing liability. “If yours is even a little bit frayed and your house burns, we would buy you a new house.”
Loading was interesting. The dryer was the first box out the door. The stock boy rocked his hand truck back steeply and laid the bottom front edge of on the tailgate. He rocked the hand truck up a little and we lifted it right onto the tailgate.
Oops.
The box was two-three inches taller than my truck cap. No problem. He popped it over on its side and we pushed it to the front of the bed. The second stock boy brought the washer; the two of them laid it down on its side and popped it in without issue.
So here’s the bottom line. Ann at Sears was very nice, very helpful and deserves the little bit of commission they paid her. I got the washer and dryer I wanted. My 25 year old dryer and 15 year old washer experienced some … issues over the winter so I put the new ones in service and moved the old ones elsewhere. And I didn’t have to take Harvest Gold. Or Plum.
This year was different.
My UPS has been talking back lately so I’m thinking it’s time. Electronics don’t last as long here as in gentler climes. Office Depot had an APC 1500 VA UPS on sale for half price. No shipping. Big batteried UPSes are expensive to ship. I set the alarm for 5:40. Ayem.
Pink and purple sunrise and me without a camera phone. It was not red enough to take warning but I did watch. Not a sight I recognized.
Got to Office Depot about 6:20 and was dumbfounded to see the parking lot full. As in seriously full. Had to drive past many cars to find a parking space.
I did (eventually and with the help of a personal shopper) find and buy the UPS I wanted. Long lines at the checkout, mostly because the cashiers were hard selling extended warranties. Everyone was helpful and very nice. No Android Tablets. None of my other gimmes.
I also looked at a Ryobi cordless tool bundle in the Home Depot flier and didn’t even bother going there. Ditto the wrapping paper at Walgreens.
I thought long and hard about the wrapping paper. Then I thought long and hard about the lines. Inertia and the fact that I don’t actually use wrapping paper, particularly here, won out. About the Ryobi, if this year is anything like last year, the store was sold out in 10-15 minutes. It is the new 19.2 volt model which matches nothing I have. Drill, light, circular saw, vacuum. I would use the drill and light but can’t see much use for the circular saw or vacuum.
Back to the UPS. The Office Depot parking lot was full but, after writing that, I realized that “full” in a small town is a whole lot different than “full” in Miami or New York. Here, there were three or four or even five peeps at each of the three or four open registers. I’m really really really glad I didn’t find anything I couldn’t live without at Brandsmart up in the United States.
Giving Thanks
Thanksgiving is a patriotic holiday, sandwiched as it is between Veterans Day and the official beginning of the Christmas Shopping season
I’ll come back to the sandwiches.
Everyone not living under a rock knows that Thanksgiving Day is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show thanks, gratitude, and love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day that fields have been barren for weeks and are now mostly covered in snow. This holiday has moved away from its religious roots and is now a time to participate in the largest single slaughter of fowl in the universe.
Here in the States, we mark Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday of November each year. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it six weeks earlier, on the second Monday in October. The snow falls earlier in Canada.
Our collective memory of the holiday is sort of wrong. In American as Pumpkin Pie, Plimoth Plantation tells us that
Prior to the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the 1621 harvest celebration, Pilgrims or Native People. Thanksgiving started as a traditional New England holiday that celebrated family and community. It descended from Puritan days of fasting and festive rejoicing. The governor of each colony or state declared a day of thanksgiving each autumn, to give thanks for general blessings. As New Englanders moved west in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they took their holiday with them. After the harvest, governors across the country proclaimed individual Thanksgivings, and families traveled back to their original homes for family reunions, church services and large meals.
I expect to have a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal this year, whether I cook it myownself or drive over to the Cracked Conch with Joe and Willie. We’ll have a small turkey with bread (not oyster, thank you very much) stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, cole slaw, candied yams, green bean casserole, and pumpkin pie for dessert.
That basic menu has remained unchanged for a couple hundred years but that’s all the older our menu is. The three-day pig-out of 1621 at Plymouth (the “First Thanksgiving”) may have had ducks or geese, but yes they had no potatoes, and bananas were equally scarce. No apples. And no pumpkin pie. Likely no turkeys who were wily even then.
I don’t care. I shall have pah.
Geeks are hoping that upcoming Android release 4.7 will be “Pumpkin Pie” and will also be ready by Thursday.
I AM a lucky boy lucky. My island house value is down so my future property taxes may be lower. My family is scattered across a couple thousand miles but we are all speaking to each other and happily anticipating a blessed event. The brakes work in my truck and that cost less than I expected. I have walls full of my mom’s art, and mine, and a host of other artists I like from Corliss Blakely and Clyde Butcher to Natalie LaRocque-Bouchard and Thomas Sully. Next week, I shall have white meat turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise on good crunchy sourdough bread for lunch every day of the week. Most important, I have been blessed by a perfect time here in my little house.
I’m disappointed, though. People decorate for Halloween and for Armistice or Remembrance Day and for Christmas. Very few put big inflatable turkeys in their yards for this week.
I wonder why?
Getting It Up Early
I have a houseful of visitors here in the Keys. I don’t understand that. In our more than 30 years in Vermont, we can count our out-of-state visitors on our fingers. Here in Paradise, visitors are numbered like grains of sand. Anyway, our friend Missy noticed that I was “up bloody early” today (Biff was still snoring then).
“No,” I told Missy. “It is the clock that has changed. I’m up at the exact same [solar] time I get up every morning.”
Thanks to the visitors, I was actually late-ish getting to bed last night and therefore late-ish getting to sleep. Late-ish is defined as early-ish by Daylight Savings standards but later in terms of the hour at which I planned to arise. The alarm makes sure I rise correctly no matter how long the temptations of the night before seduce me.
Farmers have lived according to the sun for as long as there has been fixed base agriculture. Although my great-grandfather was a dairy farmer — I grew up on the last few acres of his farm, then made a home on the last few acres of a former Vermont dairy farm — I do not farm. I prefer sleeping in and generally like to roll out of bed about 30 seconds before I have to go to work. It also means I can see the sunset, the moonrise, and the clocks strike midnight.
Clock setting is arbitrary, all because somebody in “the dawn of time” jammed a stick in the ground and decided that getting his farm workers up at 4 ayem was a good idea. Some of us don’t agree. Russia’s 11 time zones are all an hour ahead of the corresponding standard time zones and double that during DST.
Ben Franklin wrote satirically that Parisians should go green and save candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. He didn’t seriously propose Savings Time, though, no matter what you read on the Internoodle. That honor falls to George Hudson, an amateur New Zealand entomologist who wanted to collect insects in after-work daylight.
I don’t understand why we don’t just choose a time we like permanently.
Arizona, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, most Indiana on Eastern Time, don’t switch their clocks. Arizona remains on Mountain Standard Time year round. They, along with India, China, and Japan are the major industrialized states that are constant UTC+something 12 months out of 12, while the rest of us spend seven months of the year with “extra” daylight and nearly five months without.
Not even all of Arizona is exempt. The Navajo Nation does observe. The Navaho have the largest land area of any Native American jurisdiction within the United States with 26,000 square miles that covers all of northeastern Arizona, the southeastern portion of Utah, and northwestern New Mexico.
Changing the clocks irritates me but I’m not rabid about sticking on solar time except I have a regular morning phone call with one of the non-mainstream states.
A friend who lives there “finds it irritating that we have to rearrange our meetings every time all y’all flip to another time, and irritating that I have to think “Is it two or three hours different when I call my dad? Is it one hour or the same when I call my daughter or mother?”
Exactly.
My choice is to synch my own schedule rather than force the others on that call to rearrange theirs.
It just seems bloody early to start the morning to Sally. And to me.
For the record, my European web host thought this post went up at 13:00.
Memorial Day
Today is Memorial Day in the United States. The holiday once known as Decoration Day commemorates the men and women who perished under the flag of this country, fighting for what sets our America apart: the freedom to live as we please.
“Holiday” is a contraction of holy and day; the word originally referred only to special religious days. Here in the U.S. of A. holiday means any special day off work or school instead of a normal day off work or school.
Lest we forget, the Americans we honor did not “give their lives.” They did not merely perish. They did not just cease living, check out, croak, depart, drop, expire, kick off. kick the bucket, pass away or pass on, pop off, or bite the dust. Their lives were taken from them by force on battlefields around the world. They were killed. Whether you believe they died with honor, whether you believe our cause just, died they did.
Today is not a “free” day off work or school. Today is not the big sale day at the Dollar Store. Today is a day of Honor.
“All persons present in uniform should render the military salute. Members of the Armed Forces and veterans who are present but not in uniform may render the military salute. All other persons present should face the flag and stand at attention with their right hand over the heart, or if applicable, remove their headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart. Citizens of other countries present should stand at attention. All such conduct toward the flag in a moving column should be rendered at the moment the flag passes.”
The American flag today should first be raised to the top of the flagpole for an moment, then lowered to the half-staff position where it will remain until Noon. The flag should be raised to the peak at Noon for the remainder of Memorial Day.
There are those in this country who would use today to legislate the man out of the fight. They can do that but the men and women we honor today knew you cannot legislate the fight out of the man. They have fought and they have died to protect us from those who would kill us. And perhaps to protect us from those who would sell out our birthright.
There is no end to the mutts who would kill our men and women and would kill their own. If I had but one wish granted on this day, I wish not another soldier dies. Ever. But die they did and die they will.
Because those men and women died, I get to write these words again this year. And you get to read them.
Editor’s Note: This column is slightly updated from one that appeared first May 26, 2008.