The Poddyland News

There is always so much going on this time of year isn’t there!

It seems here in the USA that everyone looks forward to Thanksgiving at the end of November, which is of course a 4 day holiday for most people, something that overworked American really needs, but it’s no time to relax… There is the great meal of course, time with the family and friends, football games, and then the following day the biggest baddest craziest shopping day of them all.

Well that is all behind us now, but once Thanksgiving is over, there is the mad rush to get the house decorated for Christmas, to buy presents and wrap them, and then all the Christmas Parties to attend. By the time Christmas Day arrives, I think most people are just plain exhausted.

Despite having lived in the USA for 14 years, most of it in Indiana and more recently in Florida, it seems odd to me that the stores all have huge sales before Christmas and not afterwards. In the UK, the sales start on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, at which point everyone has been forced to buy gifts at full price, and so the sales are to allow the stores to sell off what is left, to make room for the Springtime items. It doesn’t seem logical to me that everywhere would want to drop the price oif products before Christmas. Who in their right mind would want to buy anything at full price when they know everything is going to be on sale? You would think that it would be in the interest of stores to hold off on the sales as they do in the UK – but hey – I am not complaining one bit – I like to save money the same as everyone else, but it just doesn’t make good business sense to me.

And so with it being the season for Christmas parties etc, yesterday saw our IT Department Grab Bag event at work.

The idea of this is that everyone brings in a gift, worth around $20. Everyone draws numbers to see the order that gifts are going to be selected in, and then one at a time the people go up and select a gift from the table. You can either select a new gift, or “steal” one that has already been taken from someone else. you can’t steal back anything you already had, and each gift can only be stolen 3 times.

Well, moreso than usual, the majority of the gifts were of course booze! Lots of Baileys, various Vodkas, Rums, one Single Malt Scotch, cocktail kits etc…

Since I am off to the UK for Christmas and you can’t take liquid in your hand luggage any more, I decided to not go for alcohol, and instead try to get a gift voucher. Last year I ended up with one for a local restaurant, which was good and saved me money – far more useful than something that I don’t need, especially as money is tight.

And so up I went, picked a small package, and it turned out to be a voucher for Barnes & Noble (a large bookstore chain if you are not familiar with them). I thought “ok, I don’t read much, but I can at least make use of this”.

Well that got stolen eventually, and I went up again, since most other people had selected bottles of booze by now, and these were getting “stolen” like crazy. I ended up with a 4gb Flash Drive. “Ok I thought, I already have 5 of these, but another might come in handy, or I can always re-gift it. A 16gb Flash Drive would be nice, since I can get 4gb ones for under $10 these days”.

And so the drawings went on, until that too got stolen. No great loss I thought to myself. With nothing that I really wanted from the already opened gifts, except a Bluetooth Headset that my friend had picked, and I wasn’t going to take that from him as he wanted it, so I went up and opened a 3rd parcel.

“Wow” my boss said, “that’s great, it’s a Sushi Board!”. “Wow” I thought to myself. “What the heck do I want with a Sushi Board?” Ok I will eat sushi if it’s on a buffet somewhere, but I never buy it, and I have no idea how to prepare it and would never dream of doing that. Besides, my girlfriend doesn’t even eat fish, let alone raw fish… It’s a nice wooden board, so I checked the web site it came from (which was on a sticker) in case I could somehow return it to a local store. Nope – it’s a small wood-working company, and would you believe they only sell these in pairs! So I don’t even have a complete set, only half of one! Oh joy…

Well my friend eventually lost his Bluetooth headset and ended up with 3 silver photo frames. He was not too pleased, but hey it’s more use than a damn sushi board! You can at least re-gift that… Another colleague had several gifts that he wanted, but both got stolen and he ended up with a box of chocolates. He grumbled for ages, so I thought “I can at least take the chocolates to England and my girlfriend and I can share them”. So I offered to swap with him. Would you believe I couldn’t even entice him to do that. Bloody sushi board…

So here I am with a sushi board stuck in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. You couldn’t even use it as a cutting board as the bottom is tapered in and it would probably tip over. So much for my hopes of finding a voucher to a restaurant and saving myself some money. I think I am just going to stick it in the kitchen at work with a sign that says “any takers”. What’s the betting nobody wants it even if it’s free?

I just thought that this would be an ideal topic to add to The Worst Gifts I Ever Received which is a very funny lens about personal experiences of having received the most awful gifts. If you haven’t seen this lens yet, I think you will enjoy it.

My Christmas Jokes pages have been getting lots of traffic since I updated them to add new pictures and also put Adsense on them. Last week I had been getting up to 12,000 page views daily, but for a couple of days they seemed to lose traffic and didn’t appear on the first page of Google, but now we are back at the number 3 spot if you search for Funny Christmas Pictures and yesterday I had just under 8,000 page views. Please drop by and take a look, I hope to raise some good laughs around the world.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Debnet has created a great lens about Christmas Crackers which are a great British Tradition, one which hasn’t really caught on yet in the USA, but everyone I know over here who has seen Christmas Crackers thinks that they are great. The lens also shows where you can order them, and there is just enough time to shop before Christmas arrives…

Right now time for me is going by fast, and it’s only NINE DAYS until I fly to England for Christmas and New Year. I am really looking forward to this, especially as I haven’t spent Christmas back home in England since 1993.

I could use the break. I took almost half of my 10 days vacation in February to go to England, and I am using the last 5 now, so the rest of the year I took practically nothing off. I am ready for a nice break, and also to see my princess…

If you have any family or friends that you plan to call over the holidays, or if you are travelling abroad, this is the company that I use for my calling cards – Almost Free Phone Calls. There are no hidden charges, the calls to the UK and anywhere in Europe, South America, Asia or Australia are really cheap, and I have saved myself hundreds of dollars in the last year by using their cards, as against paying the high rates charged by my long distance company or cell phone company. It’s not even half the price – it’s far lower than that! Serious Savings… So take my advice, plan ahead and save yourself some money on those phone calls. The cards don’t expire either, and you can use them with your mobile too.

Oh yes – before I forget, A NEW LENS on Squidoo…

Having got November out of the way, I managed to work on my December lens over the weekend. This has a great collection of Funny Christmas Pictures, and so far it’s been climbing up in the Squidoo rankings nicely.

There is a module in there that allows you to add a link to any Christmas lenses that you may have and to vote on them, and you are very welcome to come and add your yours, as well as to grab the module to use on your own lens. I would just ask that if you do, please can you lensroll me back, and of course I will return the favor by lensrolling you.

Have A Wonderful Week One And All, and don’t overdo it on the Egg Nog!

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 4
Top 10,000: 9
Lenses: 73

NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke December 2008

MY TOP 5 LENSES
Bournemouth
The Daily Joke December 2008
My Pet Peeves
The Daily Joke October 2008
The Daily Joke November 2008

LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME
Song Lyrics – Robert Palmer – Addicted To Love
Song Lyrics – Peter Gabriel – Spedgehammer
Song Lyrics – Rod Stewart – Maggie May

Tags: bluetooth, booze, christmas, christmas party, england, funny pictures, gifts, grab bag, jokes, pictures, Squidoo, sushi, tagfoot, thanksgiving, uk, worst gifts

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under My Lenses, My Life, My Web Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.