Over the past few weeks, we determined that we were going to get Behr paint from Home Depot. The idea is that we will paint most of the interior walls the week after my wife finishes her finals and before she starts working this summer, so that we can get rid of the awful mint green that permates the majority of the house. Consumer Reports had nice thing to say about the paint, and we found some paint chips that had the colors we were looking for and hung them on the wall.

Being as busy as we were, we had only managed to narrow down the selections but had not made any actual choices on paint yet when I went to Home Depot yesterday morning. I had a few tools I needed to get, and figured that I might as well wait until I could get a free light bulb. I happened to notice that Behr was running a promotion for a 25% rebate on paint. I came home, we chose our colors, we measured our walls, and we were out the door to get our paint. We were going to buy it in a week anyway, so this way we can get some of the money back in a few months.

Measuring how much paint we needed was a fun experience. What we did was basically measure each surface that was going to be painted for each color. We had one column that had the height and width that would be painted, and another column for the height and width of anything that would not be painted such as doors and windows. I then threw all of those numbers into a spreadsheet, had it figure out the square footage, and add and subtract all of the numbers for us.

The paint requirements for the house spreadsheet is pretty simple, and could easily be made more useful. However, this was a one-off thing so I just went quick and dirty. The amount of paint needed was off a little bit, because I assumed that one gallon of paint could cover 350 square feet of wall space. According to the guy at Home Depot, the stuff that we bought covers about 400 square feet per gallon.

If you are interested in downloading the spreadsheet, take a look and let me know if you find it useful. We wound up buying 5 gallons and 1 quart of paint, and 3 gallons of primer. Our kitchen will be yellow and orange, and the yellow will carry through the hallways and the living room. Two of the walls in the living room will be a darker yellow. Our bedroom will be a different green than is in there now. The dining room is going to be red.

I ran the Boston Marathon on Monday, and was happy that the weather was not all doom and gloom as had been forecasted for the past couple of weeks. The doom and gloom managed to blow over the day before the race, and started clearing up in the hours before the gun went off. I called my wife an hour or two after I finished the race (I wanted to make sure she was out of class) and discovered that her classes had been cancelled and that the power had been off and on all night and all day.

When my friend dropped me off at the train station, I discovered that the tracks had been washed out and that the trains were cancelled. Thankfully, he wasn’t too far away and had his phone on him so I was able to get a ride to the bus station.

The highway was flooded in a few places, and there was no power in the Portland area. Driving through Portland is very eery when there are no stop lights, no street lights, no house lights, and temporary stop signs everywhere. One of the only places that had power was the local peeler bar (which seemed pretty busy for a Monday night) and the blocks around it.

I also had to try taking four or five different routes to get home, because the roads were all blocked off. I’d get going one way, and have to turn around and try another. When I got home, I discovered that my picnic table had been blown off of my deck and into a tree. I suppose that that is better than into the brook on the other side of the tree.

Things had not significantly improved yesterday. Roads were still closed, power lines were still lying in the street, and the area was still flooded. Things are starting to slowly get back to normal, though.

Update: A coworker sent me a link to some pictures from work before the office got closed for the rest of the day. They weren’t uploaded with a creative commons license, so I can’t post the pictures themselves here. Some of the more interesting ones include the wind blowing some trees over, the flood in the driveway (there is a four foot ditch right next to the driveway, so that is a lot of water!), and some tree trunks that broke next to some trees that were torn right out of the ground.

The last time that I stopped in at Freihofer’s bakery outlet, I did not have the best experience. However, every other time that I am there I have had an average experience, and they have great prices on english muffins and bagels that I eat on a daily basis. Today, I had an experience there that more than makes up for the last time I went in.

Today when I went to the store, they had both english muffins and bagels on sale. When you can get both at or just over a dollar for a half dozen, it pays to stock up. When I got to the counter, I was chatting with the manager about the good price. I said something along the lines of how the last time I was in they were both on sale as well, which hadn’t happened before. Then I mentioned how I should have gotten my last batch for free, but I didn’t because the lady ringing me out had not been paying attention.

The store has a promotion where if a red dot appears on your receipt, whatever you are buying is free. She did not notice until after she had punched in my cash, so when I pointed it out her response was something along the lines of, “Well, I already punched in your cash, so the next person in line gets their food for free.”

When I spoke with the manager today, I was certainly complaining, but I did it in a joking way and not in any way trying to get free food out of him. He just said, “Tell you what, you can have the rest of this for free.” He had only rung up a couple of packs of bagels, so I thanked him and said that he didn’t have to do that and handed him my credit card. Of course, the amount was below what they accept credit for. I took a 5 dollar bill out, but he just decided to cancel the order and gave me all four bags of bagels and 3 packages of english muffins for free. His reasoning was that I was a good customer and he knew that I’d be back, so he did not lose much by giving them to me. Of course, I’d have been back even had I paid for all of them, and I offered to do so.

This rambling story just goes to show that some stores are willing to make good on their mistakes, even when you don’t require them to. I like that.