ReStore Score!

Yes Jeannie, I was reading the Oatmeal - I've never read it before but The Bloggess had a link to the story on her blog and I found it that way.  I just thought it was kind of funny how similar our fire stories were, though multiple cats didn't mysteriously disappear in my family's fire.  I don't think a linen closet is a typical place for fires to start, but that's where ours did.  The chimney for the wood furnace goes up through the linen closet, it was all up to code and safe and all that stuff, my dad is super-conscientious guy like that, plus he'd been a volunteer fireman for years, so he's seen how fires start.  Anyway, that summer, we'd had our house insulated and apparently, when they were blowing it in, some fell between the chimney liner and the outer compartment and it was that insulation that started the fire.  The scariest part about it was that the linen closet was right across the hall from my little brother's bedroom door and the blanket from his bed was actually trailing out into the hallway.  We were all incredibly thankful that little bro didn't become the star of his own Burning Bed mini-series, though Farrah Fawcett could have played me in the made for tv movie if she wanted to.

Talk about little bro, we're going out with him tonight.  A couple months ago, hubs met Brad Sherwood while sitting next to him on a flight to San Francisco.  Brad Sherwood, as you may (or may not) know, was one of the stars of Whose Line is it Anyway? and now is on the road doing a two man show with Colin Mochrie, one of the shows other stars.  Brad offered hubs some comped tickets to their show when it came to Green Bay, which is tonight.  We got 6 tickets and hubs and I are going with little bro and one of his buddies and WE and his girlfriend.  I'm planning on having an awesome time.

Hubs got home from Hawaii yesterday.  Usually, he calls when he's leaving the Chicago airport - it takes him as long to get to our local airport as it does for me to drive there, so I just leave home when he leaves Chicago and it usually works out peachy.  But yesterday, I had some errands to run first, so I left for Green Bay right after work and had all my stuff done just in time to head out to the airport and meet him.  Then he called me and said he hadn't left Chicago yet due to some mechanical problems with the plane.  By the time it was all said and done, he arrived 2 hours late, which meant I had to kill 2 hours in town waiting for him.  This wouldn't be a big deal if I were the kind of person who likes to shop, but I'm not, and I'd already got whatever I needed at Walmart before I knew he was delayed.  Fortunately, there was a ReStore right where I was, and if I've got to shop, the ReStore is one of my favorite places.  I'd just been doing the math on what it would cost to replace some of the floor in the house.  I like the look of VCT tiles and if I tiled everything I wanted to, it was going to cost me something in the neighborhood of $1000 for materials alone...but then, I went to the ReStore.  They had 3 cases of the exact tile I wanted.  3 cases isn't nearly enough, but it's a good start, and instead of paying $60/case, I only paid $10/case, so that was pretty darn awesome.  Then I found some purple and green tiles as well, and they had enough to do the floor on our new porch, which is going to look sooooo cool.  And I got those for only 25 cents apiece, so the porch floor is getting done for $10 and it's going to be funky looking.  Now I'm trying to decide what color looks good with green and purple checkerboard so I can paint the walls and trim.  I'm thinking probably yellow walls and maybe orange trim, because how happy would it make you to walk into your house and the first thing you see is a yellow, orange, purple and green room?  I don't know about you, but I would be VERY happy, I love me some bright colors.