The Best shopping trip to date!

So I now get emails from General Mills about what sales are coming up at Albertson's. On Sunday they let me know another great Catalina deal was coming. Buy 10 products get $10 back! As soon as the ads came out yesterday I began planning, printing, clipping and organizing.

I got my shopping trip organized into 8 transactions and my coupons sorted into 8 little bundles.

Let me tell you Logan is CRAZY with couponers so I knew I had to be organized so I could get the items on my list when the store opened at 6am. I have gone the first day of the sale at noon and gotten nothing. :( I have even checked back almost daily only to find that the Logan store "was written out" of sale items on their order.

I was STOKED about the $ I was going to save.

Well last night Brandon tells me instead of going to the airport at 8am which I had been planning on he has a flight planned at 7am. :( There is no way for me to go at 6am and be back in time. But no worries. It is always foggy or snowing. He's only flown a handful of times since the 1st of December. Chances are I can still go. So I went to bed with coupon shopping dreams. I know it's become an illness.

We both wake at promptly 5am and guess what? The weather is beautiful. :( 6:30 comes and Brandon leaves. I start getting ready praying that there will still be something left for me as soon as I get there. I get Christian off to school and the other 2 up and dressed and we head out the door.

As I am heading down the mountain Brandon calls. He is going to miss his CFI (Certified Flight Instructor) meeting to come help me at the store with the kids! He felt so bad. He had watched me planning an preparing all night for this sale.

We pull into the parking lot at the same time. We race in and grab 2 carts. I send him to the CS counter for an ad as I never actually got a paper one and I race back to the Pilsbury section knowing this is the first thing that always runs out.

Guess what? EVERYTHING on my list was still there! I almost starting crying right there in the chip aisle. The .97 chips were the last thing on my list for the very last transaction. How could this be? Week after week of living up here I have been totally shut out of some of the best deals by women who get up much earlier than I on the first day of all the good sales.

SO after checking out twice with 4 transactions each time I managed to procure

$285.35 worth of groceries for my family

for only $35.10!

That's a savings of $250.25 or

88% off my bill!

or

39.8 Cents average per item (I bought 88 things total)

Even Brandon was shocked.

One transaction had such a big overage I had to add a loaf of bread making it FREE and allowing me to use all my coupons.

Several transactions were less than $2 total.

Lots of things were technically free -

milk

bread

Chex Mix

Cherrios Mix

several cans of soup

It was a great morning! Talk about a natural high!

Oh and we were in and out in 40 minutes!

6 months today!

Can you believe we have lived here 6 months now???

It has flown by!

To commemorate the occasion here's my top things about Cache Valley

1. The views.

2. The SUPER nice people

3. The change of pace.

4. The quiet.

5. The School! Do you realize my kids have a music teacher, an art teacher, a PE teacher and a computer teacher. They also have a fabulous music room, art room, gym, and computer lab.

And it wouldn't be fair if I didn't list my top things about Roy

1. The convenience

2. My family

3. My friends

4. AYSO soccer

5. Cheaper everything. You know, like the important stuff, gas and groceries.

Valentine's Day with the Parish's

XOXOXOXOXOXOXO

Happy Friday!

Shabby

to Chic!

First haircut in 18 months! Ya Brandon's pretty happy I'm fairly low maintenance. LOL

(Sorry for the crappy pictures and dirty mirror. *blush*)

Here she is

Introducing Ella, 2 years old.

Since we were moving about the time she turned 2 we weren't able to make it in to get her pictures taken. We just barely got around to it on Saturday. *blush* I know, bad parents. I think some of them turned out pretty good!

Excersising my right. . .

to write my senators and congress people and now I feel a little better.

Dear Mr. Bishop, (and Bennett and Hatch)

Yesterday I found out some information about some of the detritus buried in the stimulus plan.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Senators and Congress people should read these provisions and remove them from the final bill because they are dangerous to your health.

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” This provision in the stimulus package outlines how your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors. But, having these records maintained on a federal government system is lunacy. The scope of the federal government is already so large that it seems as though the early American anti-federalists had the right idea; increasing that scope to allow unelected federal bureaucrats to poke around in our private medical records is quite frankly an obnoxious idea to anyone who still values freedom over government intrusion.

But the bigger issue here is that this is really intended as an end-run around the debate on socialized medicine namely the "Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research." By implementing key provisions that will allow greater federal oversight of doctors, forbid doctors to make decisions without being "guided" by bureaucrats whose only interest is cutting costs (and for whom patient care is completely unimportant), and mandate rationing of care among the elderly, the Democrats are hoping to get Hillary-style health care ramrodded into our society without any discussion of it at all.

This has nothing to do with the economy. It's nothing less than a massive power grab aimed at one of the few American industries still operating in the black. Giving the federal government such extreme control of the health care industry under the guise that stimulating the economy demands this course of action is an outright lie, buried in a spending plan that the Democrats are obviously hoping is too massive to have permitted a careful reading.

Tom Daschle knows as well, or better, than anyone that it wasn't "Senate Protocol" that kept Hillary Clinton from selling a massive government health care program to Americans in the first place; it was the people. The more Americans were informed about government health care and what that would mean for their freedom, their choices, their privacy, and their right to go to the doctor without a federal bureaucrat standing by with a veto that would forbid them from getting the care they needed and wanted, the more Americans rejected it. And this attempt to sneak socialized medicine into our society without any debate at all is the sort of thing that, in better days, would have caused good men to throw boxes of taxed tea into the nearest harbor, if you get my drift.

I am outraged by this and I do NOT want these health care provisions in the final version of the stimulus bill.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Stephanie Parish
Mendon, UT