Well, my upcoming stock up shopping schedule has changed again.
Normally, I would be heading into the city for our first stock up shop in a couple of days (Thursday), but I’ll be taking my mother to the eye specialist, instead. With that in mind, I’d already picked up a few things I knew we’d be running out of, yesterday, when I got more cat kibble in the town north of us. Grocery prices there are much higher, so I didn’t much at all.
Today, I wanted to refill our two empty 18.9L/5 gallon water jugs in the town nearest us. The only other thing we needed was more bread. Before I left, I asked my daughter to message me if she spotted anything else we were out of that couldn’t wait until Friday.
When I parked at the store and checked my message. Nothing from home to add to the shopping list.
There was, however, a message from my brother, asking if he could call me this afternoon about my mother.
Nothing he was in the office today, I figured it was urgent! So I let him know I’d just parked in town and that he could call me on my cell phone right away, if he was still able to.
He was.
Long story short, he got a call from the public housing department that owns the building my mother lives in. They don’t want to evict a 90+ year old woman, but if she doesn’t let them in to check/spray her apartment for bed bugs again, they have no choice.
They are going to be there on Friday. They even have an exact time (usually it’s between 9am an 5pm, and would have been done tomorrow, not Friday), and a manager will be there, due to her accusations of theft.
Right away, I assured my brother that I would be there. I had already been planning to go there tomorrow, as they usually come on the last Wednesday of the month.
The city shopping can wait.
As her Power of Attorney, my brother gave them permission to do in. I’ll shoot to be there earlier to move things away from the walls – they just need room for the wand to reach – and run interference with my mother. She has to stay out of her apartment for at least 6 hours. Given that she has respiratory issues, it should really be 12 hours, but that would mean spending the night somewhere. None of us have homes accessible for her, and she is no longer willing to rent a motel room. It was during a time she spent the night in a motel that she believes the exterminator stole stuff from her. Stuff that makes no sense for anyone to steal.
The guy my brother spoke to told him, they have to deal with this sort of thing all the time, unfortunately.
He also said they don’t think my mother has bedbugs, but they’ve been spraying her neighbour’s place for the past several months. If her neighbour has them, it would not take much for them to spread to her apartment. Plus, the eggs can stay dormant for up to a year. However, if the egg casings get sprayed, when the hatch, the hatchling will die as soon as it emerges. So even if she doesn’t have bed bugs, they still need to spray a certain number of times to ensure it stays that way, as far as the eggs go, at least.
So that pushes the city stock up shopping off to Saturday.
Ah, well. We’ll deal!
I still only intended to get just bread and water refills, but I still looked around.
It turns out they had some really good sales on. So good that some things were completely out of stock. The sale ends tomorrow, so that’s not surprising.
The store itself in in the process of being completely rearranged, too. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be a lot more logical in organization – and it looks like they’re expanding their international section, too!
So I ended up getting more than intended, and not all things I would normally get.
This is what $61.89 before taxes would have looked like – not counting the 60¢ for the bottle caps that got paid for when I picked them up at customer service. I cashed in a winning lottery ticket that paid for them. 😄
My loyalty card, however, had $20 I could take off the purchase, so this actually cost $41.89 before taxes.
This is what I got:
Each item shows how much the sale prices took off. You can see on the bottom that the total discounts and savings was $39.11, or 39% of the sub-total. That would be the sub-total before the $20 was taken off, so that means I had $59.11 in taken off altogether, leaving me with having to pay only $43.33 after taxes.
The things I normally would not have picked up were the boxed cereals, the instant puddings and the granola bars.
With the whole chicken, I try to get those on sale whenever I can – especially with it being over $8 off, like today.
The fruit juices were something I was looking for specifically for my daughters. I find fruit juices way too sweet. They’re basically like mainlining sugar, but it gives my daughters something different to drink.
With the bread, I usually get rye bread, but at $2 a loaf, I got two regular loaves of whole wheat bread, one whole wheat Texas Toast and one white sandwich bread.
With the cereals and granola bars, I got four different types for our 4 very different tastes.
The instant puddings were only $1 each and, at first, I picked 4 different flavours. Then I noticed they were all “low fat”. Fat is flavour, so that means they had to replace the fat with something else to make them taste good; usually sugar. So I went for the regular kind, but there were only two flavours that weren’t sold out.
Funny. There were plenty of low fat versions in stock. 😄
So, not the shopping trip I planned, but a pretty good one, I think. We got some things that are very occasional treats that I only pick up when the prices are good. Sometimes I’ll get them at Costco, but there usually isn’t a lot of space on the flat cart for what are essentially frivolous purchases.
Not too shabby, I think. Especially with today’s food prices!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 