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Shopping madness …

My first shopping season as a married guy went off without a hitch and probably even saved me money. For us, shopping day was Saturday. ALL DAY.

We woke up around the crack of fucking dawn, or 7:30A to get an early start on our day. We knew we had to meet up with my mom, who could get us into all these really cheap sales, around 9AM, so waking up that early gave us time for some early morning, pre-shopping booty before we headed off.

Now, I’ve got to digress a little. Does anyone else think that morning booty is a hell of a lot better than nighttime booty? I mean, at night I’m just too damn tired for a workout like that, but in the morning, I’ve rested all night and have all sorts of energy for the horizontal mambo. Woohoo.

Anyhow, we met up with my mom around 9AM and headed over to the “Sample Sale” in The City. Basically, its a big huge convention center filled with stuff people are selling. I’m talking about EVERYTHING. It’s an awesome place to get gifts and gift ideas. Plus the stuff is HELLA cheap. HELLA. We spent from 10AM to 3PM, just walking around the place looking at stuff, and managed to buy the majority of our gifts only spending a little over $100 … and getting really good stuff. Big stuff. Cool stuff. Of course, five hours of walking around a place with wall to wall people sucks big time, but the fact that 75% of our shopping is finished made is well worth it.

And to top it off, after eating dinner and resting for about half an hour, we headed out again from about 4PM to 7PM, to go to the mall and finish up our shopping, again spending about $100 on various gifts like clothes, toys and gift certificates for the younger ones. In all an eight hour shopping marathon. Ugh. I am at least thankful that we did it all in one day though.

Actually, we dont have much of a choice. I think I’ve mentioned how our weekends are booked up through Christmas and they’ve been that way since our wedding. So, it was either this weekend or the weekend before Christmas. Ugh.

So, what’d we buy? Well, we bought a DVD player for Wifey™’s parents, some limoges for our friends, shirts and watches for the younger girls, for mom a foot massager, and some gift certificates for various people. There’s plenty more that I can’t remember right now, but in all we probably spent about $200, half of what I normally spend on Christmas presents. Booyah!!

So that was basically our Saturday … Sunday was a bit more leisurely. Again, we woke at the buttcrack of dawn and got an early start on our day because my friends we coming over around noon for some help with their wedding. We got to the laundromat around 9AM and got the laundry started right away. I then took off to grab the christmas tree from my mom’s house and run some errands before heading back to pick up Wifey™ from the laundromat around 11AM. This gave us an hour to do some housecleaning and set up the christmas tree before the friends came over around noon.

Once they arrived, I helped design an invitation and a map for them to use as a supplement to their other invitation. It’s sort of complex. See, they are having a ceremony, then a cake and punch reception, and then a traditional chinese banquet. However, only certain people are invited to each one, so we were designing an invitation that would supplement their traditional red invitation for people invited to the banquet. Gah … anyhow, it seems more confusing than it really is. I think we figured out the basics and my friend is coming over tonight to work out the final details.

Then around 6PM, we were to meet up with them again, along with their parents to eat at the restaurant they chose for the banquet, along with trying out all the foods that would be served. It’s nothing I havent eaten before, but for some it might sound a little strange, here’s what was on the menu.

The first dish was sliced beef, sliced pork and jellyfish. The sliced beef and pork were very tasty and had a good flavor to them, but the jellyfish was a little too slimy for my taste and had a strange texture to it. It didnt taste bad or anything, but the texture wasnt quite right, and picking it up with chopsticks was quite the challenge.

The second course was a serving of walnut prawns, which I couldnt eat because of the walnuts, which I’m allergic to.

The third course was a beef dish in some sort of BBQ sauce. Very tasty. I liked this one and the only change they’ll be making to it, is to add some veggies to it.

The fourth course was a vegetable dish with large mushroom caps. I didnt get a chance to taste this one, so maybe I’ll try it at the wedding.

The fifth course was a soup. There was shrimp and tofu in a clear broth and it was also very tasty. Just a basic soup broth, but it had a good flavor.

The sixth course was peking duck with some doughy breads. The idea with this dish is to take the breads and split them open, spread some plum sauce on them and them take a slice of duck and place it on the breads creating a sandwich. This is one of my favorites, but the duck is usually really fatty and greasy.

The seventh course was a fried rice, which most everyone would recognize. Lots of shrimp and egg, make this a good part of the meal. I think they are going to take it out of the final menu and replace it with white rice and have it served earlier in the meal.

The final course was a boiled fish. As usual, its served whole, with the eyes and skin and bones. Luckily for us, the brides brother knew how to take the skin and bones out at the table, so we could actually eat it. The problem I usually have with this dish is that the people at the table usually dont know how to debone it and end up making such a mess out of the thing that it’s inedible.

Dessert was a mung bean soup. The broth of the soup was sweet and actually not bad, but the beans themselves were just like peas. Strange for a dessert, but thats what they served.

In all, it was the usual eight course chinese banquet that I’ve had a million times before, so I’m looking forward to it again sometime in February. At least this time there were things that I didnt mind eating. All in all, another long weekend.

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