Friday, February 23, 2007

Sometimes people make me sick.

I frequent a number of message boards on sites dedicated to couponing. The people there are nice and friendly. I was reading a thread and one poster mentioned that he volunteers at a food pantry. He mentioned this in a post about how he is shocked at the amount of Peter Pan peanut butter with bad batch numbers has been donated this week. I am so appalled by this. I cannot begin to say how badly this sickens me.

For those of you who are not aware, ConAgra Foods has issued a recall on some batches of peanut butter due to a possible salmonella contamination. You can read the FDA release here:

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01563.html

The idea that people would donate possibly contaminated food to a food pantry is reprehensible. The batches that were recalled still have a long way to go before they expire and probably would not have been donated if they had good batch number. Why do people suck? Can somebody just tell me why?

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Back to basics

Okay, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming. Deals!

Today was a great shopping day at Jewel. For those of you not familiar, I will explain the Avenu thing before I tell you of my awesome deal today. Jewel has this thing called the Avenu, it generates special savings offers based on your particular buying habits. It is tied to your preferred card, although if they go by what I have been buying, then my avenu should be full of toothpaste and soap offers. I don't know how they determine the offers exactly, but I check my offers online everyday. (Sometimes the deals are for organic products for those of you who are into that and think Jewel has nothing to offer you) Lately though, my Avenu offers have been crap and have stayed roughly the same for a week. So today I check my offers and I find that they have given me something to work with. The Avenu offers come off automatically, so you can use manufacturer's coupons too.

Today I had 3 offers in my Avenu that I wanted to take advantage of. $2 off Ken's Steakhouse salad dressing (limit 6), $1 off Barilla Plus pasta (limit 6) and $0.80 off Hot Pockets (limit 10). The Ken's dressing was on sale for $2 and I had $1 off coupons so each bottle was -$1.00, the pasta was on sale for $1.50 and I had $1/2 coupons so each box was free and the hot pockets were $2 each and I had $1/3 coupons, I bought 6 and each was roughly 0.87 ea. So my total was:

6 bottles Ken's Steakhouse dressing
-2 Lite Ranch
-2 Zesty Italian
-1 Lite Country french
-1 Honey Mustard
6 boxes of Barilla Plus Pasta
-2 rotini
-2 penne
-2 spaghetti
6 boxes of Hot Pockets
-various
1.25# of green grapes
Nestle Crunch w/ caramel
(for Justin)

Total came to $1.62

It was a great trip and I saved a ton of money. The overage from the salad dressing paid for the hot pockets. I can't wait to see if there is anything good in my Avenu tomorrow. Although, I need to go to Dominick's more this week. They are having a great sale, but I will save that deal for another day.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Brain dump

Okay, it has been a while since I posted, so bear with me as this is just going to be a dump of random things from the past few weeks. Let me start with:

THE POLICE!!!!!!!! - I am so going to see them. I don't care if I have to pay scalper prices. I will see them and I will have decent seats. I will do whatever it takes, seriously.

Mini reunion - This Monday we are having a bit of a mini high school reunion. I will get the chance to see some great people that I haven't seen in years, some that I have recently reconnected with. I am so excited to see everyone and am putting my bargaining skills to work for this one. As you all know from reading this blog, I am the Queen of paying Nothing for Something as Alice so kindly put it.

Bargains - Well, there has been a lot of bargains lately. Jewel tried to kill us with another P&G promotion. I had to contact their corporate office twice due to problems, but each time I was taken care of and have no complaints. Other than the deals in my Avenu have been garbage lately. Meijer is also running some good promotions. There is a new deal starting up at Dominicks that should be awesome. Since it started on Thursday, I still need to get everything together to make it worthwhile. It involves General Mills products and I have to buy some of their stuff for a rebate, so combining the 2 should equal a profit for me. As usual there are things to be paid to buy at CVS. Not as many deals there this week, but that is okay. I needed a slow week.

Freezer - On Sunday we purchased a small chest freezer. I am so excited about this. I have been waiting for almost a year for this promotion to come back around. Jewel had a deal last year where you bought a freezer for $150 and you received $150 worth of coupons for free frozen food. So, when I saw the ad last weekend, I was ready to go. The coupons are decent, about half of them have to be redeemed at Jewel, but the rest can be redeemed anywhere. If I do this right and pair the coupons with buy 1 get 1 free sales, I should be able to maximize them. I will probably trade some of them too. We are going to set up the freezer this weekend, as I am going to need it for a few things that I am buying this week. This is good timing, since it is Girl Scout cookie season and I have no room in my regular freezer.

Andrew - Andrew has had a bad cold lately, so he hasn't been eating much. Except for last weekend when he somehow ate poop, yes I said poop. I was so grossed out and I scrubbed out his mouth with a toothbrush dipped in mouthwash to kill germs. Poor kid, as I really scrubbed out his mouth. He is now obsessed with Blues Clues. He sings along and does the moves, except that he is not that good at them yet, so it is really funny to watch him.

Happy Valentines Day to everyone out there. We don't really celebrate it since Justin's birthday is the next week and we would rather make a big deal out of that. We do have good plans for this weekend. We are going to see Winger at the House of Blues on Sunday. Woo Hoo!!! Yes, I said Winger. Kip Winger is a very entertaining and engaging guy and not to mention TOTALLY HOT!!!!!!!! So that will be fun and then I am off work on Monday for our mini reunion.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

SCORE!!

I got a deal tonight that will make even my green friends jealous.

I bought 9 pkgs (10 oz ea.) of Cascadian Farms frozen organic blueberries for $4.54 at Super Target. They were on clearance for $1.48 ea and I had $1 off coupons. Woohoo!

I think we will be having blueberry pancakes for breakfast tomorrow!