Today I became a sheep. Although I usually stay sequestered at home on Black Friday, this afternoon I ventured out to Target (twice) and KMart (once), and need to return to both again tomorrow to exchange several items I bought. There was a miniscule amount of gift shopping done; most of the time was spent buying a new Christmas tree (I'm horribly allergic to real ones) and ornaments (we lost much of our Christmas decorations during the flood in our basement last winter).

I'm such a sucker for seductive advertising - KMart has signs on all of their decorated trees telling you precisely what you need to buy in order to replicate the look of the tree. I succumbed and bought into the one that was decorated all in gold - ribbons, bows, glass balls, gilded fruits - the whole thing. I feel personally responsible for what I am certain will be a profitable quarter for KMart.

On a less responsible note, when I pulled into the Target parking lot (the second time) I was appalled that fully ten parking spaces were taken up by discarded shopping carts that people had not returned to the cart corrals. When I emerged from the store the rain, which had been intermittent and light all day, was of the soak-you-to-the-bone variety and as I made the mad dash across the lot to the my car, I scooped up my bags, threw them in the back of the car, and shoved the cart in the general direction of a herd of other hastily abandoned carts, taking up several spaces approximately the size of a Winnebago. So much for shopperly accountability.

Books: Picked up The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin at the library this morning. Way too much to read and not enough time.