Day 6

*I am wondering if I’m the only one that starts the post in the morning & finally gets around to posting the next morning?? I have to keep changing current to past tense!* I was up at the crack of dawn, 4am to be exact. Dd was being picked up at 4:30am to go to Miami for her military intake testing stuff. I am so proud of her for finally biting the bullet and picking the National Guard. They wrapped it up in Miami around 3ish and then drove all the way to West Palm to sign her up for drill. She starts in 2 weeks. Woohoo for her! Breakfast for her was a studel and a bacon & cheese bagel sandwich her father had made her last night for this morning and tons of juice. Ds will be on his own, most likely cereal (no school on Fridays). Dh will have his usual and me, at 6am, being awake 2 hours, I have no idea. I’m tired. I can’t go back to bed though at this time as I need to get to work on time. Lunch will be leftovers (no taters left, we have chili, brisket, sauerkraut & brats, burgers & chicken). Dinner was suppose to be chicken apple sausage with scallop taters. That was changed at about 4:30 in the afternoon. I was beat. I decided to order pizza and pick it up on the way home. 2 xlarge pizzas set me back $30. However, I am not going to add them into my expenses for the month as I used the visa gift card. I really need to do something with the leftovers. Either freeze them or get them eaten this weekend. Would really be pushing it far on the brisket & brats though. I have a few things I’d like to do this weekend. Bake. Make snacks. Make salad side dishes. Review my menu for the week ahead. See if I really need to go to the grocery store. Pick up any new monthly sales books (Publix expires today so they should be putting new ones out). Clean out coupons. Organize coupons a little better than I have. Ha. Clean house. Do laundry. Find cat. Ds has her competition (JROTC) Saturday but as we don’t know when she is competing (3 categories) it’s kind of fruitless for us to go at 7:30am (when it starts) and sit through 20 high schools. Sure, we could do it. But honestly, its way out west and I don’t think she cares. I will have to ask her again this evening (if she is even alive & awake!) if she would like us to come. Stopped at the store on my way to work. 2 stores actually. Spent $3.03 in the first one and $11.xx in the next. Both times I had more coupons than items with the publix store coupons. All the good ones expired on the 6th, so I had to get my super cheap Pam and free veggies along with 15 cent Gatorades. That’s it now. No more. Hopefully I have enough Pam to last a few months (6 cans total??). Both times the cashier tried to hand me back the manufacturer coupons, saying I could NOT use them. Ummm, nope. Managers were confused too until I started to split them up, 2 gatorade (1 store, 1 manuf), 2 pam (1 store 1 manuf), another $1 off with a picture of Pam but that one is for the PRODUCE. That one always confused them … but I think we got it straighten out, on the LAST day … also managed to thoroughly impress a GQ’ish looking man with my $27 worth of savings on the screen. I apologized for holding the line up while the manager tried to figure out the extra coupons, and he said not a problem, he would be too as it’s money in the end. Not often that people are like that. Has anyone else noticed that? A lot of the cashiers HATE the coupons, and won’t even give a courtesy “wow, you did good today”. I make it a point to NOW hand them the coupons BEFORE they start ringing up as I think stores are cracking down on coupons for items not purchased (although I always thought it wouldn’t go through??). Total spent: $15.xx Total for month $87 (plus $1000 to AE, $75 to Cap)