1.15.2006

Third time's the charm

Still coming down from the shock of last weekend, this weekend couldn’t have been more relaxing, productive -- and, well, kind of fun …

To celebrate the end of the week, and the invention of gift cards, Kates and I took our most recent gift to the local Neighborhood Grill and dined on a wonderful three-course meal …

On any other Friday night, the dinner might be followed by a trip to the movie theater (there’s not a lot of movies in the theater we want to see right now, and besides, the ticket prices are too dang high…) or we’d pick up a couple DVDs for the night (our DVD player was stolen …). Neither was going to happen.

So.

We drove down the road to the new Lowe’s store! Woo Hoo!!

… I was a little skeptical at first, given my love for Menards. I’ve never been a fan of Home Depot. And I’d heard the prices at Lowe’s are a bit high.

… Sure it was opening night, so the store was in pristine condition. But all those presumptions I had were shot down the moment we stepped in the store. The aisles were easy to navigate and the products clearly marked. The stock is high quality and it’s of respected brand names. And the clerks were refreshingly helpful -- although it remains to be seen if that continues the longer the store is open.

But as the weekend wore on, what struck me more was this: Why is it every time a new store opens in a town I live that myself and whomever I’m with spend more time there than we do any other activity that weekend. …Seriously. It was that way in July ’96 when a new Super Wal-mart opened in Olathe and again the following summer when they opened the long-awaited Great Mall of the Great Plains and my friends and I were there something like four times in its first three days of existence. And then the Super Wal-mart scenario played out again when I was in college in Maryville …

Yeah. So it was hardly surprising when Sunday arrived and we were heading to Lowe’s for the third consecutive day.

There’s a decent explanation this time though, and it’s partly Lowe’s fault. …You see on Friday night Kates and I found the wood blinds we’d been looking for to fit our living room picture windows. We couldn’t buy them, however, without first taking the proper measurements and thus, we returned to Lowe’s on Saturday to actually purchase the blinds. But we had to have the blinds custom cut and the clerk broke the machine while cutting the fourth and final set of blinds, therefore sealing another return trip to Lowe’s for us on Sunday, when we picked up the last set.

Yesssssss.

I spent the afternoon, of course, installing the darn things, and, of course, watching the Steelers-Colts game (… which, by the way, was an instant classic and was as good as the Super Bowl will get -- no matter what teams make it to Detroit.)

And alas, our new and improved living room has never looked better or felt more cozy. Ah, the ambience …

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