A Few Random Things

There are a few things, and pictures, I want to share, but none of them are quite enough for a regular post.  So here’s a very random post, with lots of pictures.

I love grocery shopping, and I love getting great deals on groceries.  Today was one of my best deal days in a long time. 

A Publix opened here last year, practically across the street from Harris Teeter, and they seem to be in competition with each other more than any of the other local grocery stores.  Harris Teeter has been sending a month’s worth of $10.00 off of a $50.00 purchase almost every month.  There are four coupons in each flier, and they’re each good for a week.  One of my coworkers found out that Publix will take them too.   I haven’t used mine there yet because overall I prefer Harris Teeter. 

If you’re not familiar with Harris Teeter, they typically have at least a few buy two get three free sales every week.  Their loyalty card is the VIC card, and if you link an email you get extra sales and specials attached to your card every week, usually for only a few days.  This week it was $5.00 off of a $30.00 purchase. 

One of the many things I love about Harris Teeter is that the discounts don’t come off of your total until the very end.  It makes me really happy to see the total suddenly drop, especially when it drops from $254.69 to $85.14.  The receipt says $86.00, but 86 cents of that was rounding up for a donation. 

I meant to take a picture of the items in the cart because I knew this one was going to be good, but Harris Teeter seems to take it as a personal affront if you spend more than 10 seconds in line, so I got moved to another register before I had a chance to get any pictures.  Hopefully this one of the groceries in the trunk will give you an idea.

It’s hard to tell, but it’s five bags of frozen shrimp, five packages of shredded cheese, two packages of Boca burgers, ten ears of corn, a bottle of multivitamins, 2.37 pounds of cherries, a package of hamburger buns, and a small bag of cat food. 

And here’s the receipt.  I’m not sure how well you can read it, but the shrimp alone at normal price would have cost $179.90, so significantly more than what I paid for everything.  I had a coupon for a free bag of Purina One cat food (which is the brand we normally feed the cats) and the rest of the coupons were store coupons.  The vast majority of the savings came from sales.  The total saved was 66%.  My goal is to keep it around 50%, so I was very happy with that. 

Honestly, back when I was a diehard couponer I could save a much higher percentage than that sometimes.  It took a lot of time to track down coupons, it took a lot of ink to print them, and it was for a lot more processed food.  Now I tend to stick with store coupons, shopping sales, and the occasional manufacturers coupon if it’s easily accessible, and for something we normally use anyway.  Most of what I bought today fits in with our new style of eating, so that made paying a lot less even better.  Okay, enough about groceries.

We made a decision not to have a garden this year, or add a lot of new plants.  As I’ve mentioned, we’ve been working on getting rid of clutter and organizing the house.  There’s only so much time in a day, so we thought it would be better to continue focusing our time and energy on the house. 

We’ve stuck with that decision for the most part.  I can’t resist snapdragons, though, so we bought a few, and I planted them in the flower beds.  They’re very low maintenance, so haven’t really taken our focus from the house.  This one in particular is doing very well.

We also bought a shepherd’s hook, and a hanging basket to put on it.  The basket is a mix of purple and yellow flowers.  The dominant color seems to change from week to week.  This week there seem to be more yellow flowers.

Last week there were more purple flowers.  And they matched my nail polish, so I had to get a picture.

We’ve finally been able to find cotton candy grapes this year.  We had them for the first time last year, and they quickly became my favorite kind of grape, and one of my favorite fruits overall.  The only place we’ve been able to find them is Sam’s Club, and they don’t have them most of the time.  I check every single time I go in there, and they finally had some on Tuesday.  I’ve been happily munching on cotton candy grapes all week.

There’s a white squirrel in our neighborhood.  I’ve been trying to get a picture for a while, but hadn’t been able to.  White squirrels are somewhat common in a neighboring county, but not so common for us.  This one seems to live, or at least spend most of his/her time at the other end of our street, and I just haven’t been able to get a picture.  A couple of weeks ago s/he was closer to our end of the street while I was out for a walk and I was finally able to get a picture.  It’s not the best picture, so I’m hoping for another opportunity to get a better picture.  

And because no post is really complete without a cat picture, I’ll leave you with Howard’s latest picture.

So what have you been up to this week?