The Christmas Shopping Challenge

I really have never understood the appeal of Black Friday.  As much as I love a good deal, I'm just not willing to spend hours waiting in a line and then get trampled to death.  Black Friday kicks up shopping insanity that will last until after Christmas.  We feel about Christmas shoppers the same as we do of holiday travelers and suburban drivers.  None of them know what they are doing and they only care about themselves. 

Derek and I often do a lot of our Christmas shopping online but decided this year we would do ALL of our shopping online.  That's right, we are not going to step foot in a store (other than the grocery store) until January 1.  How can we possibly get away with this?  Enter Amazon Prime.  We just signed up a few weeks ago and after doing some research, we feel we can almost always get a better deal online.  Add in free shipping and the lack of sales tax, you can hardly beat it.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday we started ordering gifts.  Before we had even left to come back to Texas, we had checked four people off our list.  There were several retailers running some great cyber deals so we picked up a few things for ourselves as well.

So what does our Black Friday shopping look like?

This is just the first ten of our packages.  It felt like an early Christmas getting to open all those boxes.

So, can we make it until January 1st without shopping at a brick and mortar store for anything?  Challenge accepted!

Starting a Blog!

A few questions I think should be answered about this blog:

1. Why start blogging now?

I have thought about starting a blog for over a year but always put it off saying I would do it when I had children.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was so much that Derek and I have been doing that I would like to document.  This blog is intended to be a digital scrapbook of our lives that we can share with our families and friends.

2.  Why 'Engineered in HD'?

Derek and I (Holly, get it....HD?) are both engineers.  I am a mechanical engineer and Derek is an industrial engineer.  In my opinion, I think we live life a little differently than a lot of other people and I attribute that to us being engineers.  Everything we do has to be planned and well organized and I think that will become apparent in future postings.

3.  What interests us?

Traveling, food, wine, spending time with our families, and Clemson University.  I of course can't forget the one "child" we do have and that is our dog, Maddie. 
 
Here is a picture of us when we traveled to San Francisco last year to enjoy some great food and tour around Sonoma Valley.

More to come!  Happy Thanksgiving!