Sunset Moonrise: In the Pink

It was Black Friday in the U.S., the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

I've been running out of memory on my computer. It seems I've taken too many photos; can you imagine that? So I've been in the market to purchase a portable external hard drive that I can migrate my entire iPhoto library onto. (I'm on a Mac computer and iPhoto was the photo program that came with it.)

For the past two weeks or so, in order to upload new photos, I've had to delete old ones first to make room. Oh, the horror! What a painful, painful process!

No, I'm not good at deleting, and I take TONS of pictures. This, folks, is a pair of practices that bode poorly for those with limited digital memory. I wondered how soon my computer might start randomly eating my photos without warning - what a scary thought!

Now, let me add here that I do back up my computer at work AND at home. (This was #11 on my 300th blippiversary list of 21 tips for photographers.) I already have one 1.5 TB external hard drive at home for that purpose (a WD Elements desktop model), but weighing in at two pounds, it's really not as portable as I'd like.

So I'd been pricing some tiny portable hard drives online in the past two weeks, and I found a Best Buy ad that indicated I could get a 2 TB WD Elements My Passport portable external hard drive on Black Friday for the same price as the 1.5 TB one I'd been looking at on amazon.com, with a free carrying case thrown in.

When I woke up on Black Friday morning, I checked Best Buy's Web site and found they had the same Black Friday portable hard drive deal available online as that I was hoping to obtain in the local store, and the shipping would be free.

So I thought about it a little bit and assessed my choices, and then I placed my order online, in my jammies! I got a confirmation e-mail saying the order had gone through. So we could skip going to Best Buy and dealing with the crowds and lines and possibility of not even getting what I hoped for. Hooray!

There were also some items on deep discount that my husband wanted - car stuff, like oil and filters and windshield wipers - and so we did go to town to get those. And then we had a lovely breakfast out at Eat 'n Park - it wasn't crowded at all!

We looked at the WalMart sales brochure while having our breakfast, and decided it would be worth our time to go check out a few deals there. They advertised a nice tripod for $10, which seemed quite a good price (all of my shots so far have been hand-held), but when we got to the store, there weren't any left.

I did make quite a haul on 17 DVD movies, though (some $2, some $5, some $9 - can't beat that!); maybe I'll post a picture of the set over the weekend. And I got a hard-back 20-inch pretty bright blue suitcase for $27. My current one's about the same size but black - EVERYbody has one just like it! I think the blue wll really stand out so much better on an airport luggage rack.

Overall our shopping trip was very successful! While there was a bit of a crowd milling about the DVDs at WalMart, the checkout lines were fine and we didn't wait at all. I looked at the parking lot at Best Buy, and while it was busy, it wasn't insane. Maybe I could have gotten my hard drive in person, but I just didn't feel like dealing with the potential hassles of in-store buying!

All of that, and we were home before lunchtime! To wrap up my day's purchases, I then ordered a free Shutterfly 2013 calendar online. Earlier this week, I picked a dozen of my favorite blipfotos to feature on it; if you're interested, I'll post links to which ones for which months. All I paid was shipping, which was a bit over $6.

So that was our big Black Friday shopping extravaganza: a combination of online and in-store deep discounts. I saved lots and lots of money (although, OK, I'll admit it - it wasn't ALL stuff I really, really needed). And I can't wait to get my external hard drive and calendar in the mail.

Oh, and then to top it all off, later in the afternoon there was this amazing pink cloud at sunset, just as the moon started to rise!

And so it was that Black Friday ended in shades of pink . . .