Celebration and Deals

Today was Glenn's first day of his internal medicine rotation. I picked him up after he was done and we decided to head to Texas Roadhouse to celebrate his first day of in the hospital and (since we had a coupon for a free kids meal for Caleb's birthday) to celebrate Caleb's birthday (he turns 11 on Friday). We had wanted to go out to dinner for a while to celebrate Glenn finishing his tests but it just hadn't worked out. We decided that Grandma Hansen would treat us to our dinner out. We had sold a couple of dressers that we had gotten from her house that were too small for us on craigslist this spring and decided that she would have liked us to use the money to go out to dinner so, after tithe, we put the money in an envelope for this momentous day ;) (After we were done eating Caleb said that she probably would have taken us to McDonald's instead of Texas Roadhouse - I'm glad we got to pick the restaurant!) We love going to Texas Roadhouse. We went during the 4-6 early special time and with Caleb's meal for free our bill came to less than $35. For all 6 of us! And we were all full and brought home leftovers from every meal. And it was delicious!

Caleb (with his mouth way too full of steak!) on the saddle after being told Happy Birthday by the waitresses :)

 After Texas Roadhouse we decided we needed to go to Staples to pick up the penny and quarter deals. On the way we stopped at the Thrifty Shopper. We found a new with manual/ recipe book Whirley-Pop popcorn popper. We have been using a regular pot but it is dying and making popcorn in it isn't helping so we thought we'd get it. We also found a 2 pack of US map puzzles. (the map on the back you can color on your own). Our total was $2.62.

Whirley-Pop and US map puzzles

We then made our way to Staples and spent the rest of our $3. We got 2 reams of paper, 2 things of glue, 2 packs of pencil top erasers, 2 packs of pens, 2 packs of stickie flag things, a graph paper notebook, and a 3 pack of mini legal pads. My grand total was 37 cents! (I had Staples rewards from a couple of months ago for $15.20 that I used). I am going to get almost $12 back in rebates as well. I love back to school sales :)

My Staples loot that I spent 37 cents for :)

Staples shares the same parking lot with BJs and since Glenn's phone died this morning (and he decided not to get a pager yesterday saying that they could just use his cell phone, hard to do when your phone is dead!) we decided to go over and bother the Verizon salesperson there. We love the Verizon sales people in BJs. They are so much nicer than the Verizon sales people anywhere else. I think that it is because they are so thrilled to have someone to talk to :). Anyway, the guy showed Glenn the cheaper phones (they would still need a $10/mo data package) and he could tell that we really didn't want to buy anything today and knew we were only there because Glenn's phone died. He asked us if we had any old phones laying around or if any friends did. We do have 2 old LG clam shell phones that were our original cell phones. One was ours one was my dad's. We got them when we lived at the Christensen's. When we upgraded and added my phone onto our joint plan in October of 2006 he gave us his old phone as a toy for the kids. When our phones were stolen in August of 2008 we took both phones back from the kids and were going to start using them but it was going to cost $20 each line to change phones. We were going to get phones for free for re-upping so we just re-upped. We've been dragging our feet not wanting to sign another contract with Verizon and praying that our phones would last us. My Env2 turns off randomly and Glenn's Palm Centro has been giving him problems for a while. He also has had to charge his through his computer for the last year since he left his charger in St. Louis last summer. He's trying to charge it on his computer right now hoping that it will work but we are also charging our old LG. There was nothing wrong with it when we stopped using it (that I can remember). I think that we just wanted cool new phones because we were eligible for them and we wanted to get a phone for me. Anyway, the Verizon guy at BJs told us that we could just change phones ourselves online with our MyVerizon account at no charge. That is a change from 3 years ago. So, this may be Glenn's phone for a while and we may have to make the cell phone decision that we've been putting off for a while sooner rather than later. I am grateful that we aren't going to have to make the decision this instant and that this phone can be a little buffer zone. (When our phones were stolen we were phone-less for about 2 1/2 weeks making a decision about what to do. With Glenn needing his phone for pages that is not an option this time!)

Glenn's "new" cell phone

Another praise- we found out earlier today that our bank intercepted a $300+ groupon purchase that someone had made with Glenn's credit card. We have to pay $5 for them to send him a new credit card but that is a lot better than someone else spending all our money!

Thanks God for yummy, inexpensive, fun family food and fun at Texas Roadhouse; fun, cheap geography tools; a yummy snack maker; school supplies on the cheap; and another friendly, helpful BJs Verizon person. Thanks also for a bank that looks out for us. You are so faithful, generous, and good! Thank you for a good first day for Glenn. Please continue to be his strength and help him to learn a lot in this time of training. Thanks God also for neat conversations he was able to have today!