Jersey Boys

Happy belated Valentine’s Day; that is if you are into that kind of “hallmark” holiday.  Since I am a good husband, I did pick up a gift for the CFO while we were in Hawaii.  (I bought it while she was busy with the conference and then hid it in one of our bags for the trip home)  We didn’t do much for the holiday, because Bunko night fell on V Day and the neighborhood ladies didn't want to reschedule (or spend the evening with their husbands?), so she went out to play with them.  That was fine with me, it gave me time to catch up on a couple TV shows that she doesn’t like but I really enjoy.

On Friday night, we drove west to Peoria to go see the show Jersey Boys.  She saw the ad for the show back in September and I gave her the tickets as a Christmas present.  She wanted to go out for a nice dinner beforehand, but then we found out that a Chick-fil-a had opened up in Peoria.  Hello combo #1 with lemonade for dinner! Nothing says romantic dinner like Chick-fil-a!  At the show, our age bracket was definitely in the minority, there was way more gray hairs (or should be gray if not for a bad dye job) in the audience.  We enjoyed the show, but it left me wondering how accurately the show portrays the life of the group, the Four Seasons?

We had talked about spending the night in Peoria and then driving another 45 minutes north on Saturday morning to go to the huge furniture store in Kewannee, IL.  However, I couldn’t find a decent room that we were willing to pay for… it was either a crappy $69 motel 6 (she has minimum standards that this doesn’t meet) or over $150 for a nice room downtown (which to me, is way too much to spend on a room 45 minutes from home).  We did the math and decided to just head home and decide on Saturday morning if we were going to drive to the furniture store.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to the question of, “are you ready to go couch shopping?”  That meant that we were turning around and heading back to where we came from the night before.  However, for me, the more important morning question was “what are we doing for breakfast?”  I was thinking getting some donuts on our way out of town, but she sweetened the idea of a return trip to Peoria by offering up a return trip to Chick-fil-a  for breakfast.  How could I pass that up???  Furniture shopping here we come.

Nothing says love like a heart shaped biscuit

We’ve been to this particular furniture store once before, and I might have written about it then.  This is no ordinary furniture store, it is a destination.  It is in a historic downtown area and the store fills several blocks worth of multi-story buildings.  It even has a “skywalk” over Main Street so that you can walk to the buildings on the other side of the street without going outside and it also has a restaurant in the basement.   The place is huge and it is very easy to get turned around and lost in it.

We walked around for over 2.5 hours with a sales person (YES, that long!), took a break for lunch, walked around some more on our own and then paged the sales person to finalize things.  We got there a little after 10am and left just before 4pm.  Crazy. The good news is that we found a couch that we could both agree on.  The bad news is that we wanted it in a different material/color, so we will have to wait 6-12 weeks to get it.   To finish off the trip, we swung back by Chick-fil-a for a chocolate shake… Yes, we visited Chick-fil-a 3 times in less than 24 hours.  Delicious.

The CFO wanted a couch that would "pop" in the room.  How about green with star fish accent pillows?  It is hard to tell how these things will turn out when you are making decisions based on small swatches of fabric...Our fingers are crossed.  You'd think we were decorating a house with a view of the ocean, not a corn field. 

 

Sunday was pretty quiet; we went to church and then out to run some errands.  We were just wrapping up our grocery shopping at Kroger when we heard an announcement on the P.A. system, “Ladies and Gentlemen, there is an odor of gas in the store so we need to evacuate the building immediately.”  Seriously?  We just finished filling our cart and we are ready to check out!  We parked our car near the registers, along with 10-15 other people’s carts, and walked outside.  It didn’t look like the situation would be resolved anytime soon, so we decided not to wait and walked to our car.  Evidently we weren’t the only ones who didn’t think it was worth waiting, there was a mini-traffic jam exiting the parking lot.  I kind of feel bad for whoever had to put away all those carts of un-purchased groceries... at least nothing in our cart was perrishable.

Neither of us felt like repeating the shopping process at another store, so we grabbed some lunch and went back to the house.  We will make due with what ever food is in the pantry and freezer this week.  It was sunny, clear and a balmy 30 degrees outside, so I decided to go out and cut back all of my native grasses with the weed eater.  I was only out there for about an hour, but it was so nice to be outside, even though it was a little cold.  I can’t wait until spring; I am tired of being inside all the time!