I’ve gotten this same email about five times now, so I wanted to give everyone a heads up that if you tend to give gift cards around the holidays, you need to be careful that the cards will be honored after the holidays. Stores that are planning to close after Christmas are still selling the cards through the holidays even though the cards will be worthless January 1. There is no law preventing them from doing this. Below is a partial list of stores that you need to be cautious about:

Circuit City (filed Chapter 11)
Ann Taylor- 117 stores nationwide closing
Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug ,and Catherine’s to close 150 stores nationwide
Eddie Bauer to close stores 27 stores and more after January
Cache will close all stores
Talbots closing down specialty stores
J. Jill closing all stores (owned by Talbots)
Pacific Sunwear (also owne d by Talbots)
GAP closing 85 stores
Footlocker closing 140 stores mo re to close after January
Wickes Furniture closing down
Levitz closing down remaining stores
Bombay closing remaining stores
Zales closing down 82 stores and 105 after January
Whitehall closing all stores
Piercing Pagoda closing all stores
Disney closing 98 stores and will close more after January.
Home Depot closing 15 stores 1 in NJ ( New Brunswick )
Macys to close 9 stores after January
Linens and Things closing all stores
Movie Galley Closing all stores
Pep Boys Closing 33 stores
Sprint/Nextel closing 133 stores
JC Penney closing a number of stores after January
Ethan Allen closing down 12 stores.
Wilson Leather closing down all stores
Sharper Image closing down all stor~s
K B Toys closing 356 stores
Loews to close down some stores
Dillard’s to close some stores

(If any of these stores are wrong, let me know so I can correct it.  Snopes has confirmed some of these)

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I would like to say that I was sober for the entire time I was at Izeafest.  I ended up as the driver 2 out of the 3 nights, and I really don’t believe in drunk driving.  That being said I did do the IzeaHunt without anything alcohol in me.  We had to do a ton of wild and crazy things.  What was at stake?  A $100 gift card for Home Depot for all of us.  When money is on the line, well, you do crazy things.  Honestly I wish I would have brought some other outdoor clothing with.  My clothes were almost destroyed from this scavenger hunt.  It took several washings once I got home to get the shaving cream and chocolate sauce out!

For some reason, I cannot find my team photos on Flickr at all.  What I will do is show you some of the other teams instead.  You will see how crazy this really did get:

Ohh I take that back, I did find one and you can’t see me (yeah! — I’m in the blue shirt):

Ok, we had to do crazy things like take a picture with a 6’5″ person, make a human sundae, get pineapple and a potato, walk somebody else’s dog, etc.  There was 4 pages of things, and we only had about an hour to try and do as much as we could.  One of the more crazy things we had to do was find a toilet seat and bring it back.  I think Ted was the only one who was able to do that!  Unfortunately, my team did not win.  However, it was still a ton of fun!

After the hunt was over, we all took a break, sat down, talked, and ate some great food.  I was able to sit down and talk to Cass and Sean Jackson.  It was hard to believe that I was going to be hopping on a plane the next morning and heading back home (what I didn’t know at this time was that Chicago had gotten record levels of rain and my yard was literally a swimming pool.  The water in my yard was up to my knees!).  We were able to compare notes and just enjoy ourselves.

Copyright © 2011 My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact mythoughtsideasandramblings.com @ gmail.com so we can take legal action immediately.