Fires, Shoes, and more
Well I was reading more about the lumberyard fire, and they are pretty certain it was arson. It appears to have started in several places, and when the first firefighter got there he noted that the fire had spread evenly over the entire lumberyard, instead of being concentrated around an origin. That doesn’t happen naturally, it only happens with an accellerant. So they’re testing for the accellerant and seeing if it matches up with the other two lumberyard arsons in the area this week. They already have the ATF involved too. Sad, sad, sad. That lumberyard has been around since 1880!!
I finally got some new shoes! Two pairs, even — the first time I think I’ve ever gotten two pairs of shoes at the same time! And get this, I actually got a pair of Sketchers. Me. Sketchers. Ugh! I can’t believe it! But I got a really amazing deal, read on to hear how!
Well the Sketchers really do look nice and were the only sports shoes there I liked at all. I went to get some New Balance, which I like and have had for many years, and I went to a store that had a New Balance pair for $29.95. Nice! Well, it was this cruddy all-white basketball shoe. New Balance has really thrown off it’s original image (I always kind of thought of them as the ‘indie’ shoe) and started going with Nike / Reebok looks. Yuck. So, the only New Balance shoe I liked was an $80 pair.
But then I saw these shoes. Insanely comfortable, leather shoes — the kind that are sort of like low-top hiking boots crossed with loafers. Note that on that link they are $80. Like I said, insanely comfortable, they have this gel kind of insole thing. Very nice. But not sneakers, and I needed to replace my sneakers, so I put them back. Even though — get this — they were on clearance for $39.99!!
I was getting seriously discouraged, and was ready to walk out when I saw these Sketchers. I liked them! They’re $63 on that page, but this place had them marked $59.99 — but on sale for $44.99! Ok, they felt good. They looked good. They were mine.
Here’s where I got REALLY thrifty. I took both pairs up to the front, because….tada! There was a Columbus Day Sale, buy one, get one half-off! But, boo-hoo! Apparently the $44.99 sale was for another style of shoe. But they honored their mistake (they had my shoe over the sale sign, instead of the dumb shoe) and only charged me the $44.99! (ShoeCarnival, people, they’re still one of the good guys) The other pair went down to $20, and I pulled out an additional $5 coupon. The total: $64.33. That’s right, $143 of shoe for $64.33! Not bad!
As for other news, I’ve been slow on progress with anything this weekend because I’ve been having fun with the in-laws. Ha! I can take weekends off! Plus I remembered that today is Columbus Day and probably the clients that are expecting stuff from me early this week are off today and wouldn’t count that anyway. Right. Here’s hoping….
I did get to work a little more on my Todo Assistant though and I suppose technically I could start using it now — although I’m about to add a pretty big feature (item grouping) and don’t want to totally screw up my data files, so I’ll wait for now.
I got a copy of CPU Magazine (Computer Power User Magazine) last night and read it, and it’s a very good computer magazine. It has regular articles by some really bigshots, whom I’ve been indirectly familiar with for years. Such as Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, who started Slashdot.org, Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech.com, Chris Pirillo from TechTV, and Alex “Sharky” Ross of SharkyExtreme.com. A great crowd! So I’m going to get Jen (she’s also the CFO of our company) to approve a subscription for our company.
Oh and one final thing — reviews are finally starting to come out for the Minolta dImage Z1, which is the digital camera I’m looking at getting. The reviews are really positive! And since if I bring in as much as I’ve billed this last month, I’ll have made 50% over what we said it would take before we got the camera, I’m hoping to be able to approve another $80 for a 256MB SD Memory Card from Walmart and get some real memory behind those 3.2 Megapixels and 640×480 30fps movie capabilities on that baby! 