Last Taste of Summer

As I prepare to leave my hometown, Waukesha, and my home state of Wisconsin, I have had a few last minute wonderful summer adventures. They began this past Friday.
To preface the first adventure, I'll have to explain one of my duties as a CA in a residential hall at UMN. I have to make door decs. If you have recently spent any time in a residential hall, you would see the names of the residents decoratively placed upon their room doors. One of my duties is to create the decorative door flourishes for the residents I will be looking after in the next year-a total of 75 people. I also have to make another 19 door decorations for my fellow staff members. If you do the math-or if your math handicapped like me and used a calculator-that is a grand total of 84 door decs. Thinking of a way to display the names of the 84 co-ed residents was fairly challenging. I was searching for ideas on what to do when the lovely Goombah said, "Why don't you just write their names on paint samples?"
 At first I was a bit against this idea, but the more she suggested it, the more I liked the idea. I finally decided the enhanced paint samples would be the perfect door dec for my floor. Wonderful. "But wait," I said to Goombah, "I leave for school in four days. What are we going to do, go to Home Depot and casually grab 84 door decs." And this, my friends, is where the adventure begins.
We began at a Home Depot on one side of town. As we entered we found it difficult to look like we actually belonged there. Lets be honest, what the heck can two college students actually afford at Home Depot? A bunch of free paint samples, maybe a pack of gum. That is just about it. I could tell the Home Depot employees were on to us.
 "Goombah, maybe we should, I don't know, look around a bit?" We started walking casually through the power tools isle. Great idea, right? Of all isles to walk down, this is the one where we look the least bit suspicious.
We slowly meandered back to the paint supplies area, and found ourselves in front of a wall of samples. "If we both grab about ten or eleven, then if we go to four different places we will have enough!" Goombah suggested.
We divided the wall in half, as to not grab the same colors, and began our paint sample snatching. Once we had collected our goal amount, we nodded in approval of our paint sample seizing abilities. As we turned I saw them. Two ten-year-old(ish) girls with their mother. "There on to us." I whispered to Goombah. The Mother laughed as she realized we knew that she knew, and Goombah and I ducked out of the paint area and out the Home Depot doors.
The same routine continued until we got to Menards, our fourth and final paint sample destination. Menards paint samples were not as out in the open as the previous places. As we began grabbing samples I refrained from counting how many I had grabbed, suddenly I had a large handful of paint samples. A whopping 43. I had exceeded the goal amount. "Uhm, in case I make a mistake?" Goombah and I laughed and headed out Menards' doors.
On a less adventurous, but more advegturous note, The Fam and I went out to dinner on Saturday night for The Rents 27th wedding anniversary. (Congrats to The Mom&Dad!) We went down the street from The Dads work, a grand little place called The Packing House. The Dad had looked up the menu in advance and saw that there were two vegetarian options, not a grand selection, but a selection none-the-less. We started with an appetizer. A sampling of fried eggplant, mozzarella sticks, fried onion strings, and bacon wrapped water chestnuts (which I obviously did not eat.) But the fried eggplant was surprisingly the best part of the meal! It was splendid. It was so good that I would honestly recommend going there just to get them. I then got a plate of vegetable alfredo. Although it was delicious, I found myself disappointed because the waitress had stated that asparagus would be part of the dish, but my plate was asparagus-less. And it would've been just that much greater with a few spears of asparagus. What a shame! Overall though, it was a great dinner and a fantastic final Wisconsin restaurant meal!