Grocery Cards, Grocery, Gas, & Sundries

So, first to catch up — yes­ter­day was a long, tir­ing day.  I vol­un­teered to help drive The Son’s fresh­man high school class on a Geol­ogy field trip.  I took the same trip with The Daughter’s class three years ago.  It was fun and infor­ma­tive (we live just down the road from some extra­or­di­nary geo­logic curiosi­ties) but it was also exhausting.

The “only” money I spent was $300’s worth of gro­cery cards from the school.  The school gets 5% of all gro­cery card sales; it’s such an easy way to donate to the kids’ school and this year they’ve made it eas­ier than ever to buy them.  I placed a stand­ing monthly order for $300 split evenly between Kroger and Nat­ural Gro­cers that will be charged to my credit card.  I’ll still receive my cash rewards for the pur­chase, the school will ben­e­fit, and I’ll still buy gro­ceries — when­ever I have a car, that is.

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

Today def­i­nitely did not go as planned.  I’d planned to stay at home and do some house­work — namely the kitchen and laun­dry.  But I was due to go get a blood test to check my thy­roid lev­els over two weeks ago and I really needed to get it done.  Since I’m dri­ving on another field trip tomor­row and Mon­day is Labor Day, The Hus­band called from work and offered to run by the house and take me to the lab.  I didn’t want to go but say okay any­way.  I needed to make a deposit for The Son (the $100 cash he got for his birth­day last month) and I needed to have the blood draw done.

Dork that I am, we got all the way up to the lab only to real­ize that I’d left the test order form clipped to the cal­en­dar on the side of the ‘fridge.  Argh!  So we stopped by The Son’s bank and the post office before he dropped me off at home.

I’d been home just long enough to eat some brunch and take a quick look at my web­site design project when The Hus­band called again.  He had more errands to do and offered to take me back up to the labs.  He was afraid that the kids might decide to hang out with friends before com­ing home from school leav­ing me with­out enough time to get back to the lab before they closed.  So he came back, again, and picked me up.  After the lab, we stopped at his bank, Whole Foods, and the clean­ers before head­ing back to the house.  Now it was almost time for the kids to come home at which point I’d have a car and had a few other errands to run.

The kids arrived home at 3:30.  As I was putting together a gro­cery list The Son informed me that he was com­pletely out of soap in his bath­room — the shower and the sink.  Now a two years ago I could have waited a month before replen­ish­ing the soap; a year ago I could have got­ten away with a week.  But now he’s show­er­ing every sin­gle morn­ing before school.  And wash­ing his hands on a reg­u­lar basis too.

So no soap meant I needed soap right away.  I did con­sider steal­ing a bar from my own bath­room sink or shower but I always for­get to take the bar into the shower with me and then have to open the door and get water every­where.  Or have to step into a wet shower stall to bring the bar back to the sink.  It’s a pain.  So I bit the bul­let and decided that a trip to the mall was nec­es­sary.  I con­soled myself by real­iz­ing that we were out of choco­late milk and Nat­ural Gro­cers only car­ries quarts, not half-gallons.  Tar­get, on the other hand, car­ries half-gallons and is in the same mall as the Crab­tree & Eve­lyn store.

Of course, I needed other gro­ceries they don’t have at Super Tar­get and I’m not will­ing to pay for at Whole Foods (espe­cially since Whole Foods dis­con­tin­ued their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the gro­cery card pro­gram at the school two years ago), so I had to stop at Nat­ural Gro­cers too.  And the gas sta­tion.  Tomorrow’s field trip is a 4-hour round trip drive so the Sil­ver Bullet’s less-than-half-a-tank wasn’t going to cut it.

And by then, the whole day was gone.  I got home and The Son helped unpack and put away the gro­ceries.  The Daugh­ter, grudg­ingly, helped me load up the dish­washer, and I got to work mak­ing din­ner.  Right after din­ner I got to work mak­ing a batch of brown­ies (Dr. Oekter’s. Yummy!) and a sin­gle batch of my famous hot-pocket sand­wiches.  Tomorrow’s field trip is not only ridicu­lously far away, it’s also in a ridicu­lously remote area.  Lunches need to be packed (not that I could eat if there were a restau­rant there any­way) and The Son con­sumed the last two sand­wiches from my last dou­ble batch for lunch today.

By the time all of that was done, I was ready to crash.  So the ques­tion begs, why am I still up talk­ing to myself?

Okay, quickly, here are all the particulars:

Whole Foods — $30.07

• 4 boxes of Kashi Cin­na­mon Har­vest cereal — $3.00/ea. (nice sale!)
• house-brand elbow noo­dles — $1.19
• house-brand fusilli pasta — $1.19
• 2# ground beef — $9.98
• 1.26# toma­toes — $5.03
• bag cred­its — ($0.20)

*I’d told myself I’d start buy­ing the grass-fed beef but when I got there it looked like it had been in the case for the bet­ter part of the day and I just couldn’t bring myself to spend an extra $1/lb for it.

Crab­tree & Eve­lyn — $43.60

• 6 bars of Aloe Vera milled soap @ $3.33/ea.
• 6 bars of La Source soap @ $3.33/ea.

Tar­get — $4.02

• one half-gallon car­ton of Hori­zon choco­late milk — $3.94

Nat­ural Gro­cers — $89.37 (gift card balance)

• Apple­gate Farm roast beef — $5.19
• 2 pkgs Apple­gate Farm smoked turkey — $3.99/ea.
• 2 pkgs Apple­gate Farm roast turkey — $3.99/ea.
• bot­tle of Pro­bi­otic cap­sules — $13.99
• bot­tle of fiber cap­sules — $20.25
• 2 Brown Cow cream-top yogurt cups — $0.79/ea.
• Wil­low River colby/jack cheese — $4.25
• Wil­low River muen­ster cheese — $5.59
• 4 cans Muir Glen tomato sauce — $1.59/ea.
• 4 cans Muir Glen no-salt tomato sauce — $1.59/ea.
• dozen Nest Fresh eggs — $1.79
• gal­lon of Hori­zon 2% milk — $5.19

Safe­way Gas — $21.54

Tanked up the Out­back with 8.978 gal­lons at $2.399/gallon.  The Sil­ver Bul­let now has 16,912 miles on it.

And, that, my friends is that.  Now it is way past time for me to go to bed.

Related posts:

1. Day 17
2. $$: Meat and Potatoes
3. $$: Gas, Juice, & Small Loan
4. The First Day…
5. Day 89: Gro­cery Store Triple Whammy