Blundering Butterfingers

Yesterday I did a Coupon $ense Safeway run.  The targets: Charmin TP, Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, Nature Harvest bars and eggs.  Of course I also picked up a few dozen other on sale items, but always the pull is the outstanding prices on the C$ Hot Deals.  I mean, please.  The Cinnamon Toast Crunch is normally priced at $2.89 a box.  Safeway had a special for 4/$10.  Then I had a Safeway flyer coupon making them 4/$6.  On top of that I had 75 cent coupons for each of the four boxes…. that are “doubled” to $1.00.  And the grand total for each box was a mere FIFTY CENTS. (An 83% savings) Why don’t they just hand them out on the street corner???

Onward to the broken egg picture.  The 18 count eggs were on sale B1/G1  (buy one, get one free), so 36 eggs were placed delicately in the cart.  At the check out stand, the eggs didn’t fare so well.  They were the last items I was pulling out of the cart and somehow the edge of the top carton caught the side of the grocery cart and out they plopped.  Trying to correct the situation, I gripped the carton firmly enough to hang onto it, but too firmly for the eggs in my G.I. Joe kung-foo grip. 

I have never broken a single egg in a grocery store in forty-two years.  That should count for something.  But no.  I looked up from the slimy mess that was dripping through the cart onto my Charmin TP, and said to the checker and the bag-girl, “Clean up on aisle 3…. I just broke a bunch of eggs.”  The bag-girl immediately grabbed a roll of paper towels and was heading around through an empty check-out lane, but then she disappeared???  What in the world??  Not a good time for a potty break.  She returned a few moments later and said, “I just went to aisle 3 and there weren’t any broken eggs.”  Oh.  See the drippy mess by my shoes???  I kindly replied, “It was a poorly timed joke,” and half smiled at the poor girl as we started wiping together.

The egg shells were still in the bottom of the cart so I picked up each goopy mess and dropped them back into the carton.  But, when I finished there was a vacant spot in the carton.  One egg was MIA.  How could that be?  They wouldn’t fit through the cart slots??  I looked all over and finally lifted up the carton to reveal the culprit, hiding from me!  Eleven or twelve of the 18 were smashed and oozing.  BUT, the whole mess was cleaned up in time for me to pay and run from the store red-faced.  “Did you need help out, Mrs. Crosby?”  Not today!

When I retold the entertaining story to my family, my daughter asked, “Did you have to pay for them?”  “No, broken eggs are absorbed into the dumb shopper fund.”  :o)  Thank God, Safeway has a dumb shopper fund.

Let the Good Times ROLL

Toilet paper is an American family enigma that is not going away anytime soon.  I have yet to meet a family that consists of two or more family members, where one is NOT a Toilet Paper Nazi.  I mean, really.  If you’re going to buy cheap, flimsy, poke-my-fingers-through TP, then I need to use at least one-and-a-half good spins to adequately polish off the job.

I have fond teenage memories of gathering around the dinner table with Dad, Mom, my older brother and younger sister, and listening to my father’s lecture about toilet paper usage violations.  Distinctly I can still hear the deep, baritone voice commanding, “If you are a scruncher, you need to become a folder.”  And thus I embarked on my folding days, which have served me well for twenty-something years.  (I have saved my husband million$ of dollar$ during the past 21 years, thanks to my father’s wisdom.)

Yesterday, I asked my brother if he remembered that family “talk.”  He replied in his money-minded, business-like manner, “No, but I’ve always been a folder, so it wasn’t something that applied to me.”  Then he proceeded to tell me that everyone in his family uses too much bathroom tissue, exceptions include only himself and his diapered son.  (See!  He’s the TP Nazi in his house.)  He mentioned one infraction when he heard the roll spin faster than a centrifuge.  He wanted to yell, “I hope you’re cleaning the whole bathroom with that!”  But didn’t.

Since my conversion to Coupon Sense, we have, for the first time in our married life, purchased QUALITY toilet paper.  (It was on sale AND there was a coupon, making it less expensive than the bargain brand!)  Only being familiar with the cheap goods, this new stuff feels like 12 ply.  Sweet luxury at my disposal.  Unknowingly, I married a TP Nazi, and he stood true to form after the new flannel-soft privy paper appeared in our powder room.  Rick yelled from the john one night, “I hope you’re using less of this toilet paper now that we have this good stuff.”   I assured him that I was still a folder, ….but only twice now.

In the early hours of the morning, necessity called and I made enough movements getting out of bed to ensure Rick’s wakeful state.  After sitting there in the dark for several minutes, I yanked on the paper harder than I ever have and that baby spun as fast as my front-loading washing machine on full tilt.  Rick hollered from the bed, “I bet you had to put your arm way over your head to make it spin that fast.”  Oh, did we laugh.  Undeviating from his economical character he added, “You better be rolling that back on there!”  I could not stop laughing.  O.K., I was really overtired, but it still makes me smile.

Who’s the TP Nazi in your home?  If you can’t think of anyone else, it’s probably YOU!