Jasper Jones

Is it just me? Or are there a lot more motorcycles on the road now? It seems like the parking lot at school has a big chunk of parking for motorcycles and scooters, as well as the old fashioned two wheeled bicycles, too.

My dad even has a motorcycle now. He bought a Harley Davidson from a guy that works for him who couldn’t keep up the payments. So my dad took over the payments and gave the guy an extra $500.

That opens up a whole wide range of Christmas gift ideas for what I can get for my dad this year. I’ve been looking at the web site called Biker Hiway and found some gift ideas, like motorcycle helmets.

Even if he already has a helmet, in Tennessee if you have a rider on the bike, both people must be wearing helmets. So I can buy him a scorpion exo 1000 and he can either use it for his own or use it when he takes someone for a ride. I just have to make up my mind if I want to get him the scorpion or the shoei rf 1000. They are both rad helmets and the cost is about the same. So I have to see which style my dad might like and just go with it.

So if we go ahead with the mall kiosk, the critical question is, “what do we sell?”

We need to find something that is an inexpensive gift item, because this is just for the Christmas selling season. We need to keep the cost down to a level where people won’t hesitate to spend the money on an impulse item. Around $10-$20.

It should be small in size and not too heavy, so it can be carried out easily. Probably no larger than a folded sweatshirt.

I found a couple of wholesalers on the internet and will have to do some surfing to see if there is anything really cool that we can do.

I just realized that over the next 4 weeks we have 4 birthdays in my family and I need to get some birthday cards and birthdays presents in the mail. I think I’ll do most of the “shopping” on the internet if I can find enough of the right gifts. Besides the advantage of having the gifts shipped to the right address, another great advantage of shopping online is that I can use the discount coupons and promo codes from the www.1-coupons.com web site and save a little money, too.

For my sister I can find something nice at Barnes and Noble. She loves books, dvds, and all kinds of music, so it won’t be hard to find her something nice. I can just order it online and have it delivered to her house.

I like to send my mom flowers for her birthday, so I can use the ProFlowers promotional coupon code and save enough money to upgrade the arrangement and send a nice bouquet or dish garden.

My grandfather has a special birthday this year and I’m going to try to get a day off from work so I can drive up to Nashville and see him on his birthday. But to make sure he gets his birthday gift on time in case I can’t get there, I’ll order something nice from Bass Pro Shops - that’s one of his favorite stores.

I don’t know what to get for my dad for his birthday. He is so hard to buy a gift for - he has enough money that he goes out and buys whatever he wants, so how do you figure out what kind of gift to buy someone like that? Best thing I can come up with now is a couple of funny tee shirts from Big Dogs. He always wears Big Dog shirts around the house and on weekend errands, so if I can find something funny then I know he’ll like it, it will fit, and he will get some use of it.

With the cost of gas going out of sight we are starting to worry about how this will affect air fares and available flights around Christmas when we want to go home for the winter break. Alex needs to go all the way back to California, so we decided to check out some things on the internet.

Alex likes to use Expedia to make his travel plans, so we checked out the regular fares for a trip home. Then we went to the discount coupon site that I like to use and checked there for coupons and promo codes that we might be able to use for the trip.

He found promo codes to use on the Southwest Airlines flight he wants to take, so we went ahead and booked the flight and saved some money with that.

He won’t need a hotel room while he’s out there, but he will need a rental car since he drove his own car out here to have it for school. So when he goes home he’ll leave his car here and just get a rental out there. The coupon site had travel coupons for car rental companies and we found a good deal on Budget Car Rental so we booked that, too.

Alex is all set for his trip home for the holidays. Now I have to make my own plans, but I actually need to stay here for most of the holiday and work at my new job. It will be nice to have a break from school, but I still need to be earning money and the hospital needs me available for my shifts. So my trip home for Christmas will probably just be a quick 2 day weekend.

My mom is a big fan of shopping on “Black Friday.” Although she kicks off her Christmas shopping as early as October, the big month for her to shop around and find the bargains is usually November, and the day after Thanksgiving is the mother of all shopping bargain days.

A lot of stores have special prices on high dollar items to get your Christmas shopping money as early in the day as possible on Black Friday. For example, my mom got word that Best Buy was opening their doors at 4:00 am on Black Friday last year, so she was up and out of the house by 3:15 am for a full day of bargain hunting. At Best Buy she scored big on a digital video camera under $100 and a portable DVD player for under $50. All the big stores will have special deals this year - and if you know about them ahead of time you can plan your whole day around which stores you want to get to early and which can wait until later in the day.

Some of the same stores are now bleeding over into the next week with special deals on “Cyber Monday.” These are deals you can only get online, and the best part of that is there’s no crowds, no parking issues, and they can ship everything to either your house for the gift giving in person or they can ship it to the person’s home or business address for the relatives and friends out of town or who won’t be able to be with you on Christmas for the gift exchange. I’m a big fan of cyber monday and will probably take advantage of the online deals this year and have everything shipped to my parents house so it will all be there when I get home on the Christmas break.

All the kids want to get together and buy one big present for my dad this year for his birthday. That’s fine with me - sure makes it easy for all of us. My brother will collect the money from each of us and go buy the present. All I have to do is buy a card and sign it.

My brother thinks that buying my dad a grandfather clock will be the perfect birthday gift. I thought they were a little more expensive than what we could afford, even if we all pool our money together. But maybe not. I want to check it out and see what is involved in buying a grandfather clock - does it come already assembled? How much does it cost to ship grandfather clocks? Can we get it delivered in time for the birthday dinner that my mom is fixing?

There’s a great web site called 1-800-4clocks that has all kinds of clocks, and they specialize in grandfather clocks. I liked several of the different models that they sell, and I never realized there were so many things to know about buying the right clock. But I was right about one thing, a grandfather clock is a large investment and with our gift budget we’ll be better off buying a nice mantle clock for dad.