The public days at Brickworld were Saturday and Sunday.  Both days were open to the public from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM.  7 hours of answering those same stupid (mostly) questions that we've been hearing at shows for years is enough to drive anyone crazy, especially when you haven't been around the main hall (The Ravinia Ballroom) and seen everything yourself yet.  Now no one expects any BW attendee to stay in the hall the whole time—that would just be insane.  After all, people have to do the basic activities of going to the bathroom and going to get something to eat during the day.

The funny thing is that if you're an IndyLUG member, going on a trip to a LEGO store somehow also becomes one of those daily necessities.  Thus it was that Jeramy, Mark, Brian Alano, Tom and myself went to the Woodfield LEGO store on Saturday afternoon.  We decided on Woodfield, because we had just been to Northbrook the night before, and we were curious as to what Woodfield had.  We would have to rush a bit since we had to make it back at least by 4:00 when the Saturday prize awarding ceremonies started.  The Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg is further from the Westin than the Northbrook Mall, but it's still relatively close, and it's on the interstate.  We planned to make it a quick trip and grab some lunch at the mall for the way back.

We arrived at the Woodfield LEGO store and found that, just as I had seen at Northbrook on Friday afternoon, we weren't the only BW attendees to think of making a mid-day jaunt to a LEGO store.  The Woodfield LEGO store is the smallest LEGO store that there is, but it gets quite a bit of traffic compared to the others due to its location.  (The Woodfield Mall is the biggest mall in Illinois.)  Since the PAB wall is always along the back wall of a LEGO store, this makes the number of PAB bins significantly smaller at the narrow Woodfield store.  Despite this limitation, we found a "holy grail" of LEGO pieces: DARK GREEN 2X4 BRICKS!!!

Dark green is one of the most highly sought after colors in the LEGO spectrum, and the 2X4 brick has only appeared one at a time in 2 large sets.  Yeah that's right—it's rare...really rare.  Most colors of 2X4 bricks that you see in PAB are so common that it's not cost effective to buy them at a LEGO store.  The 2X4 brick in dark green in decent quantities, however, goes for about 21-28¢ a piece on Bricklink.  That fact made finding them in the PAB a great deal, because we knew that all of them were new, and that we could buy them in a very decent quantity.  What am I saying?  The amount of dark green 2X4 bricks that we bought was so large that it was indecent.  Really—it would make you physically sick with envy to see just how many of those precious sweet gems of ABS that we walked away with that day.

Jeramy and I were the ones who were really wanting to get gobs of those 2X4's.  I briefly contemplated getting an entire PAB tub instead of a cup or two.  The problem would be filling a whole tub in the small amount of time that we had.  I looked at Jeramy and could tell that he was thinking the same thing, so I asked, "You wanna split a tub?"  He agreed, and we started frantically scooping out bricks and stacking them.  Luckily a 2X4 brick is a piece that's pretty easy to stack.  While Mark was busy filling some PAB cups, Brian and Tom helped Jeramy and I stack the bricks to maximize our value.

A couple of men came by while we were filling the tub and asked what we were doing.  Jeramy tried to explain how a 2X4 brick in dark green is quite rare, so finding them in bulk made it a great value to buy.  The two guys didn't seem to understand.  I think he tried explaining it a couple more times from different points of view, but it still wasn't clicking in their heads.  Finally he told them, "The pieces in here [the tub] would cost us $400 to $500 if we bought them online, but we're getting this tub for $100."  That monetary perspective seemed to make them finally get it.

Eventually we completely emptied out the bin of 2X4's, and when we'd stacked them all, there was still some room in the tub.  Jeramy grabbed some ash 2X2 tiles while I grabbed some pink flower petals and some other tidbits.  Of course, we did the obligatory shaking to make the loose pieces settle so that we could fit even more pieces in and gorge the tub to its brim.  Jeramy and I were going to pay for our stuff together so that we'd make it to the $150 mark and get the full 25% BW discount.  When they rang us up, I noticed that the readout thing on the front of the register said "30% off $150 purchase."  When they gave us the total, we exchanged a quick that-was-cheaper-than-I-thought-it-was-going-to-be glance.  I guess it paid to make the trip to the Woodfield store; they had a 30% discount instead of a 25% one.  5% isn't much, but it was a nice surprise when you're trying to stretch your LEGO budget as far as it will go.

Well, we zipped back out to Mark's truck and had to skip getting lunch.  We were running a little late, but we made it back in time to get to the Michigan Ballroom before Saturday's ceremonies started.  Later that night (way later that we should've been up) I brought up the PAB tub, and we sorted and split up the bounty...and somehow the big pile of dark green 2X4 bricks paled in comparison to my newly aquired

FREAKIN' GOLD C-3PO!!!

Total for Saturday afternoon: $104.54

To be continued...