The Devious Duo in their natural habitat.

I am getting complaints for not blogging in over a month, but I don't have anything really specific to talk about, so I will now tell a story that is unrelated to this present day.

The day: February 13th, 2010.
The place: Richland Bible Church.
The mission: Motivate high schoolers to donate winter clothing to the homeless.

As part of the service project team, my solution to the mission was, "Tell them whatever grade brings in the most stuff gets to do whatever they want to Michael's hair." Michael was the youth pastor at the time - I live with him and his family now, funny story - and he consented to the idea under a few reasonable conditions. The whole thing got more complex when we added a point system to the articles of clothing - coats were worth the most. The grade that accumulated the most points won the prize of controlling the fate of the pastor's precious locks, and we would later take all the clothes collected and hand them out to the homeless downtown.

Here's the thing: I really like to win. Here's the other thing: when my obscene level of determination is combined with my best friend's equal level of determination, not a force in the universe can stop us from reaching our goal. The lengths we go to may be slightly questionable at times, but always worth it. And Reina and I decided from day one that this competition would be ours for the taking.

And so, we waited until the day before the end of the battle - a Saturday - and traveled to The Salvation Army. Fortunately, Reina's mother is quite supportive of our antics, and allowed us $50 to spend. Obviously since coats were worth the most points, we imagined buying the whole store out of them, because clearly $50 is the equivalent to $5000. Much to our dismay, The Salvation Army coats were priced at 6-8 bucks at least. That would allow us maybe eight coats, which would not put us in the lead.

Discouragement began to set in. We stood in front of the coat racks, staring hopelessly as if our gaze would reduce the prices.
And it did.
That, or Jesus was exceptionally on our side that day.
A voice came over the loud speaker: "Just to remind everyone, at 5:00 we will be having our 49 cent sale, where everything with a yellow tag is only 49 cents."
Reina and I turned and stared at each other for a moment before embracing each other and jumping around in circles shouting, "YAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!"
Then we looked at the clock.
It was barely noon.
But no matter. We would wait.

In preparation, we loaded up two shopping carts with every single coat that possessed a yellow tag. In total, we collected 83 coats. Yes, 83.

 

We then found a nifty room towards the back where all the recreational type equipment was on display. No one went back there except some old people who were walker-shopping. It was the perfect place to hide and protect our winnings.

However, we knew we were going to get hungry in the five hours that we had to kill. Reina ran to her house to collect nourishment while I stayed at The Salvation Army on guard.

Reina returned with the only nutrients one needs to survive: poptarts and a 2-liter of coke.

There was a little table in the corner - probably placed there specifically for us. It was behind it that we parked our coats, sort of like they were an exhibit and if anyone wanted to get in to see them they needed to check in at our front desk. Of course we would turn everyone away, because those were our coats. At least at 5:00 they would be.

 Something else Reina and I are really good at is taking a potentially outrageously boring situation and entertaining ourselves to the point of being able to blog about such a joyous experience.

You might see this picture and see a room containing some beaten-up exercise equipment, a hefty supply of crutches and walkers, and an unnecessary amount of skis. But Reina and I saw a playground.

We spent the afternoon racing on crutches (I liked to use them to make myself feel like a transformer as well - keep them down and they were robotic legs; hold them up and they were wings; point them forward and they were guns), playing on the treadmills in a manner much like five year olds, feasting on our gourmet poptarts and hydrating ourselves from the 2-liter, memorizing the Salvation Army Mission Statement which was hanging on the wall, sword-fighting with ski poles, annnd knocking the skis over (which was an accident and admittedly all me).

 Half-way through picking them back up... Seriously, I touched one and they all went down like dominoes. And crashing thunder from Zeus himself.

That's the hole in the wall where we were fed our weekly gruel (that was when the room turned into a prison for a little bit).

Eventually, 5:00 came around, and with it one of the more uncomfortable store check-outs I have experienced. It took about a half-hour, and I felt the need to declare every 53 seconds or so that we were giving these coats to charity, not hoarding them for ourselves.

The trunk was packed as well.

I will never forget the triumphant feeling we experienced when we marched into small groups the next day, enormous garbage bags in hand - and then announcing that we needed help bringing in the other twenty or so. It took a solid 15 minutes for the group to unload our car. 

And our reward: