Good morning!

I'm so sick that I should go back to bed but bed is boring when you're there alone. I've been working myself back and back to an earlier bedtime every night so now I wake up early in the morning whether I have to or not.

I stopped at a Super Target yesterday to pick up some groceries. For some reason, I thought that would be relatively cheap. I was WAAAAY wrong! They have some interesting marketing ploys over there. The biggest is where they take an overpriced name brand and sit it next to their overpriced store brand which now doesn't look so pricey as it sits next to the name brand.

After you've hung around grocery stores for a few decades, the prices are so far from where they started that you get pretty disgusted. Have you bought soup lately?! I remember buying ten cans of soup for a dollar. It was probably tomato soup...but I could eat for days on that dollar. I remember shopping on Monday because Green Street Market always had milk for 99 cents on Mondays. Yesterday I broke the 4 dollar milk barrier. A gallon of milk was $4.40. I wish I had kept pumping my breasts after I nursed the kids. I had no idea how high that shit would go in my lifetime...which seems to be still going on so milk may get over 5 bucks before I croak.

The first time I ever went grocery shopping was at 7-11 the night we moved into our new apartment. I had just moved to California and I had never heard of 24 hours grocery stores. On top of that, I didn't know that 7-11 was so much higher than the other stores. I walked up and down those 3 aisles with my cart purchasing way overpriced stuff. My aunt had to tell me how stupid that was.

I was a young wife and decided to shop a bit smarter after that. I went to Safeway and saw 4 heads of lettuce for a dollar. That may have been a good price but I only ate one head of lettuce for that dollar...the other 3 rotted in the fridge.

My father tried to help my mother shop a bit more frugally once. He bought a gallon of corn and told her how much less it was per ounce. She laughed at him because even with 6 kids...you're not going to finish a gallon of corn before that stuff goes bad.

Anyway, you have to eat so I have to grocery shop.

I hate spending money on some things because there are always other things that I'd rather have. I don't like to buy bras or purses and it amazes me that women would love to have a purse that says, "I just spent more money on this purse than I have in the stupid thing." I don't get the thrill of giving my money to someone else who takes it and pays someone else to carry it.

I get a kick out of being cheap. The other day I bought a 10 pound bag of chicken quarters that I cooked in one day, de-boned and then used to make chicken and dumplings one night, chicken soup the next and then I made chicken bar-b-que. That was 3 dinners and a few lunch's all for 4 bucks. Now THAT'S fun. I would wager that it's more fun to me to spend 40 cents a pound on meat than it is for my daughter to spend a thousand dollars on a purse. I don't know how I raised one of those.

Oh, last night I was watching The Family Guy and I noticed an amazing similarity between a guy that I dated last year and Peter...THE Family Guy. The guy who I dated not only looked like him, he pretty much treated women like Peter treats them as well.

That's a guy who I didn't realize was a drunk because I spoke to him on the phone so much before I saw him. He seemed like a nice guy and even though I had seen a picture of him...I was gonna be nice and see if a goofy looking dude might not be a good idea. I haven't had one in a few years.

Well, goofy looking or not, his charming personality was buttressed up by vodka. When we were on the phone, he could drink all he wanted. I couldn't figure out why his personality changed so much until I realized that he was a bit of a lush. It was the vodka that was charming, he was a buffoon. I'm so glad that I didn't raise any rotten guys like that. Can you imagine a normal family spitting out a freak drunk/buffoon dude? And I met his family...they're normal. I don't think they were all drunk.

Anyway, I've bored me. I'll be back in a bit...I have to suck coffee for a bit.

:)