June Cup

june_cupLast weekend I decided to have a little ‘me’ time and took off for a trip to the local Lego store. It had been a while since I’d updated the store’s entry on wallofbricks.com, and I am ever curious about what treasures the wall might hold for me.

Since I don’t drive, I rode my bike out there. It takes about an hour, but there are bike lanes most of the way, so I don’t have to fight with cars. I was tired and sweaty when I arrived at the mall, so I started with a smoothie and a short break on a bench.

The sale items at the Lego store were pretty boring, so I headed back to the wall. I used my phone to take pictures of every bin, so that I could update the listings at home. The Pick-A-Brick wall is a great source for cheap Lego, but since the contents seem rather arbitrary, I like to use wallofbricks.com to keep an eye on what is currently available.

The problem with crowd-sourced sites, of course, is that it takes volunteers to keep the information up to date. I try to contribute whenever I can to keep it useful for others.

With the picture out of the way, I started filling a large cup. Though I wandered up and down the length of the wall a couple of times, the three elements that I kept coming back to were 2×2 tan corner plates, olive cheeses, and black travis bricks. I recently bought a full cup 1×2 tan plates, so the corner plates would make a good complement. I can always use more travis bricks for my microscale endeavors. I have no idea what I’ll do with the olive cheeses, but they’ll come in handy some day.

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When I got home, I set about using my photos to update the wallofbricks.com entry. Sadly, I took terrible pictures this trip. Far too many of them turned out to be blurry messes. I did my best, but I had to set a few of the bins to ‘unknown,’ since I had no idea what they contained.

Well, not the best, but certainly better than it had been.

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I didn’t get around to counting my bricks until later. It takes a bit, but I really like knowing how many pieces I bought and how much I paid per. This cup had 1237 pieces inside, bringing the price per piece down to 1.3¢. That’s pretty sweet, considering that travis bricks average about 20¢ apiece and I bought 229 of them. That’s about $40 in savings!

Another successful trip.