Holiday Travel

• Changing four airline tickets on Delta: $75/ticket = $300
• Adding new rental reservation for 5 days = $250
• Being able to let kids recover from pneumonia before traveling = priceless

Interesting side note... I couldn't just extend my current rental car (a minivan, Chevy Uplander) because we had made the reservation through Priceline. This completely stymied both Budget's national and local offices. So I we just made another reservation through Priceline for the same kind of vehicle, picking up on the day we were to drop off the current rental. One would think that they will simply let us keep the current vehicle, but who knows. Their inefficiency has cost them. We bid a lower rate on the new reservation, since it won't be during peak holiday season, but would have been happy to pay the old rate if we could have just extended the current reservation. That comes out to about $15/day = $75, plus whatever take Priceline is getting.

Black Friday

Yesterday my wife convinced me to go shopping with her and her sister. Normally I dismiss the idea of shopping on Black Friday, smugly stating that people should just buy everything online. Long lines, supply shortfalls (artificial or not,) and the like are all just signs of inefficient markets that will be replaced by the ruthless efficiency of e-commerce. Somehow Crystal talked me in to hitting the mall at 7 AM...

One amusing thing to me is the bait-n-switch items. These are the "limited" quantity items that are offered at a huge discount (do stores actually take a loss on these things?) in order to get lots of people in the store. The store then runs out quickly, so customers wind up buying other, more expensive items. This year's bait-n-switch special was definitely GPS units. Not only did every big-box store out there have sub $200 GPS units in limited quantities, but places that don't normally sell GPS had them as well. Get your GPS at Long's Drugs or Sportsmart, woo hoo!

Black Friday was actually a lot of fun. My niece has managed various American Eagle stores for the last ten years or so, thus I have a lot of empathy for the folks who work on Black Friday. They all seemed to be in a good mood yesterday, and I had a good time joking around with people.

Black Friday had a dark moment for me though. I managed to drop my Blackberry in a (thankfully clean) toilet. I fished it out quickly, and took the battery out of it. I waited a few hours, and it booted it up. The keyboard was crazy though. Sometimes it would not type at all, but other times keys would be entered without me touching anything. So I took the battery back out and left it out over night. This morning everything is working good as new! What a relief!

Yesterday ended on a very bright note. We are going to Florida for Christmas this year, so my wife decided to give me an early present: a Nintendo Wii. She didn't want to try and hide it from me in the luggage, and this way we got to play it with our family in Bakersfield. I am happy to say that I have a sore shoulder this morning from playing Wii Tennis late last night... She asked me if I wanted other games for it, but I really did not expect a Wii and had no idea what games are supposed to be good on it. I will probably get Madden for it, just because I used to love Madden on the PS2 and Gamecube. Guitar Hero looks like a lot of fun, too. I have basically taken the last 3.5 years off from playing video games, as I stopped having time for stuff like that when we started having babies. I'm not sure how much time I will have to play it now either, maybe once I finish my book :-)

Palo Alto 4th of July Chili Cook-Off

Today we went to the 26th Annual 4th of July Chili Cook-Off in Palo Alto. It was a lot of fun. They had inflatable jumpers and slides that Michael, Jr. really enjoyed:



Of course we had to try some chili. Here we are learning the secrets from one of the chili chefs:


Our favorite was Papa's. Another really good one  was the Margarita Meata Chili. It had a nice mix of tequila sweetness and heat.


We'll definitely have to go back again next year!