Tryphoon’s Lair

Second weekend in SoCal and we are blessed by a long weekend / bank holiday, special time for us to recharge our batteries and spend some time looking around… Well, not exactly…

It seems that each and every bank holiday in this country are the theatre of major sales, from cars to chiropractors, including telephone handsets, BBQ, washing liquid, super large portions of food, well, you get the drift!

So anyways, as we saw a couple of ads on TV (yes, we have been watching the ads here, as we only have an old style TV) for Sears et al for their sales…

So first thing in the morning, the family is ready and we jump in our car having a clear plan of action in mind. Let’s go “quickly” to Sears, Ikea, Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Ralphs, Trader Joe’s and more if possible… I know, it sounds silly, but we thought we could complete this relatively rapidly…

FOOLS!

So we did cover most of these places but it took a bit longer than we hoped it would… Actually, it took us most of the day!!! Poor Thia spent almost 6 hours in her push-chair, sleeping through lunch time as we were still at Target trying to understand how this place works (following Sears and Ikea and a couple of 99¢ hot dogs).But the result was pretty impressive. We ended up coming back home with:

• A set of 2 cordless phones
• A US size BBQ (Still to be collected at Sears, if anyone has a LARGE car, any help would be greatly appreciated).
• A 32” HD LCD TV (following some tough negotiation from Sarah)
• An XBox 360 to replace the one I had to leave behind in the UK
• A Dual Tuner TiVo device
• A Wifi router (aka a rOWder in this country)
• A bag full of nappies, air freshener and baby stuff from Target

And the rest of the evening was spent in trying to install all this new AV kit, facing the challenge of a new set of standards, connections and set top boxes…

Thank you Mr President for this fantastic day.

I am a poor man now!