Free Food

Here in College Station (and that other town that we do not speak of) there is a glorious place called Blue Baker. It has sandwiches, soups, salads, pizzas, cookies and they bake their own wonderful fresh bread. They have a different bread of the day every single day of the week. Saturday is by far my most favorite day to go here. Saturday = Pumpkin bread. This is the most moist, flavorful  addicting bread they have. Tons of college students, families and old folks go to Blue Baker to eat a refreshing healthy meal. We will come back to this marvelous place later. I am part of a graduate/young professional group at Grace Bible Church that meets every Sunday for bible study and meets throughout the week to do activities. We have volleyball every Monday evening, which I go to as much as possible. We have a prayer breakfast every first Saturday of the month. We have game/movie/pot luck nights scattered everywhere and sometimes we do crazy things like paint our bodies blue in order to get free food. Back to Blue Baker. Blue Baker has this policy that says "If you paint yourself blue, you eat free!" The Grad/young professional group (we will call them GRAYPs for short, thanks to Josh A.) decided in the event planning meeting that this would be an interesting thing to do. They were wrong. It was an amazing, humorous, magnificent event! 10 of us met up at the church (all wearing blue) and started to cake on the paint. There are 4 levels of blue at Blue Baker. Here is their go-to blueness rating:

Side note: I have done this before. Looking back, these two blue experiences were INCREDIBLY different. The first time I did it, I did it with my group of friends and this was Sophomore year of college (2007). It was me, Sarah, Caitlin, Peter and some boy (maybe Jeff?) that I think Sarah had a crush on. We went to Home Depot and bought a can of blue house paint. Now, did we tell them that we were painting our bodies with the paint? Nope. We just had the paint man make the prettiest blue color, bought the paint and took it home. When we got home we went outside in our blue t-shirts and shorts and dug in (yes, with our hands). We started gooping it all over each other. We were going for Level 4 blueness. We covered our legs, arms, faces, necks, and then someone (who I am almost certain wasn't me) got the great idea to put the house paint in our hair:

We painted our entire heads blue. We were all so stoked to walk in Blue Baker and get free food, and honestly we were probably looking forward to all the "Are you CRAZY?" stares. We walked over to Blue Baker since we lived close and while walking over I noticed that my hair was getting more and more stiff. I had never done this so I didn't really think anything of it besides, "Man, my hair feels like hay, cool."

Well we stuffed our bellies and hung out at Blue Baker for a while until we decided to go home and wash off. We get back to the house and go to the backyard to wash off with the hose and it comes off fairly easy on our face, arms and legs (thankfully, we bought the latex based paint and not the oil based). We had to give it a bit of a scrub, but nothing horrible. We started to wash it out of our hair, but it wasn't working so well. The girls decided to go inside and use shampoo because surely that would work. One entire shampoo bottle later, we still had blue in our hair. We tried combing it, soaking it, scrubbing it. It got out some of the blue, but there was still a lot left in our hair. I (back in my stupid days) suggested get some paint thinner to use because that is what my dad used to get paint off of us when we were his painting slaves. One of the guys ran to the store and they were closed so he stopped by a gas station to get some lighter fluid because that is basically the exact same thing (not). Well we were desperate so we poured that junk in our hair. It maybe helped get another 25% of the paint out, but it burned like heck! And stunk. Well, eventually we got enough out of our hair or our arms were so tired from washing our hair that we dried off and put fresh clothes on. We all looked in each others hair and found streaks of blue. The next couple of weeks (months for Sarah) we would always brush some blue out of our hair or find a strand of blue hair. Looking back, it was a ton of fun (as long as you look over our ignorance). Yesterday's blue experience was much different from the one 6 years ago. Like I said before, we met at the church and started painting ourselves. This time we used Halloween face paint that was made for painting your body.

We covered ourselves in blue and then raced over to Blue Baker. When we got there, we did get the laughs and stares that goes along with painting your entire body blue. But then again, we all ate for free. If you know me, this was totally worth it.

We enjoyed our tasty dinner and discussed about having a "blue night" every other week. I told them I wouldn't mind being in charge of this wonderful event. I'm pretty sure they were joking, so they might be surprised when they get an e-mail from me next weekend saying that we are having another "blue night". :)
When I went home to wash the blue paint off, it came off like butta (slang for butter). It was so easy to get off, well at least compared to the last time I did it. :) If you haven't yet, go paint yourself blue and go get free food!! Do it.