November 23, 2007

It wasn’t nearly as busy at work as I thought it would be. One of my restaurants sites at the edge of the Wal-Mart parking lot and we are generally pretty busy on Black Friday so I was expecting to be extremely busy. It started at around 5am and we were busy until around 7:30, then it died for a couple of hours and got busy again, but nothing like I thought it would. Even the Wal-Mart parking lot wasn’t as full as I had seen it in years past. As far as I am concerned that’s a darn good thing.

We did around the same amount of business as last year but I was actually hoping for a bit more since I am a better operator than the last guy that was there. I ended up leaving around noon and going back down to the store where I have no manager so that I could get some work caught up there and shoot out early.

Some of the malls and stores around the country opened at midnight and one to catch the early shoppers. Check out these fools as they rush the mall in Mesquite, Texas at one this morning.

The police look like they are thinking ‘fuck this noise’. I don’t blame them a bit. That stuff is what the Internet is for.

I did manage to get out at a decent time and have already gotten home and set up the Christmas tree. I will leave it to the kids to decorate tonight as I think I am going to lie down and take a nap soon. Unfortunately I have to be back tonight at 9pm and am pretty darned tired.

Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, two of the suspects in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway are to be appearing in court today for a hearing to decide if prosecutors were right in having them arrested two days ago. As I posted yesterday, and has been all over the Internet for the last two days, Joran van der Sloot was also arrested and will be extradited from the Netherlands to Aruba shortly.

According to the prosecutors, the new arrests came about because new material in the investigation has surfaced and although they have not stated what the new evidence is Aruba’s chief prosecutor Hans Mos stated that the new evidence is ‘so important that we think we should have arrested these three guys‘.

During the preliminary hearing the judge can authorize their detention for eight more days, giving police that much time to produce the evidence, at which point they go before a judge again.

Dave Holloway, the father, believes that areas of deep water near Aruba were not searched extensively enough and is relaunching a search for evidence of her remains in the area. Based on talks with a police official and a private forensic expert, he believes that Natalee was thrown into deeper waters than the depths of 300+ feet that have already been searched.

A private boat owner is providing divers, sonar equipment and the ability to map the ocean floor to the search.

As far as the arrests, Dave Holloway stated that ‘I hope I’m not going to be disappointed, we’ve seen these arrests and re-arrests in the past’. All three of the young men were first detained in 2005 and released for lack of evidence.

With today being ‘Black Friday’ I have been up for about thirty minutes. Certainly not because I am going shopping but as a result of other folks going out to do the same. I have to go into work about an hour early as today will be one of the busiest of the year. One of my stores sits in a Wal-Mart parking lot and thus will stay packed most of the day.

I was looking online for some deals last night though and once I am finished writing for the morning will go back out to a couple of web sites. There are still a few presents that I need to get. I was looking at a couple of Raymond Weil watches for someone and I need to pick up a couple more toys as well. We have already purchased most of the stuff for the girls as well as my nephew but I still need to find something for my niece.