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My Precious Pennies

I will be AWAY until late February as we do this moving thing...again.

Ginger from Attention Target Shoppers & Tricia from 1stopmom
will be holding down the fort in the meantime - thank you so much, ladies!

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Saturday Shopping Mania

Yesterday was an EXTREMELY busy day for us. It was an expensive day too, since we spent more yesterday than we have all week. Here is a quick run down of our expenses yesterday:
  • Nail trim for dogs: $6.00
  • Dog Baths (as shelter donations): $25.00
  • Commissary shopping (for next week's menu): $24.59
  • OshKosh clothing for Hailey: $10.71
  • Children's Place clothing: $8.56
  • Sunglasses for me: $9.14
  • A much needed watch from Fossil: $21.49
  • Pink Pepper Spray from Outdoor World: $12.89
  • Walmart storage units for today's declutering: $12.06
  • Jamba Juice (because I couldn't deal with the hubby's whining anymore): $4.61
  • Target mirror, body pillow cover, and filing system: $20.93 from giftcard
  • Denny's (my only "flaw" for the day): $35.60
Total expenses: $191.04 (Only $170.11 OOP due to gift card, and only $145.52 if you don't count the weekly commissary grocery shopping trip)

Our day started at 7:30am, since we had to prepare for the moving claims representative to come out and inspect all of our 55 damaged items at 8am. The adjuster should get the report by Tuesday and hopefully by Thursday they will be able to give us a settlement. I am so ready for this to be done with. Although we scheduled the appointment so that my husband could be home when it happened, he got called into work and all of our scheduling was for mute. I like to schedule maintenance or similar apppointments for a time when my husband will be home because if the baby starts fussing or needs nursing, the worker will then be left unsupervised. Luckily the baby didn't fuss too much yesterday morning.

By noon my husband was back, so we then took the mutts to check out a grooming salon, get their nails trimmed, and get them a bath. Now, I know that from a frugal standpoint we really shouldn't have done this, but the nail trims were only $3 each, and for the amount of time and stress it takes us to do it, I consider our $6 well spent. We have to chase Chloe around the house, yank her out of her crate, and then my husband has to literally sit on her for us to trim her nails. And while this is all going on, Chip will be hiding under the couch, and Chloe will be panting and trembling. $6 is definately worth avoiding all that stress on everyone. I also managed to get a good look at how the grooming salon works and how they treat the dogs, since Chip does need a maintenance cut every 3 months or so. I've tried doing it at home before, but he ends up looking so ugly and bald we've abandoned that idea. They quoted me a price of around $30, which isn't so bad, so I'll let them deal with a squirming dog and the hair cleanup afterwards.

Normally we give the dogs a regular bath at home, but a pet shop down the road was having a dog wash day to benefit a local rescue. So for a $25 donation, I got both of them bathed. This is more than I would regularly pay for a bath, which is $0 when done at home, but since all of it went towards an animal rescue, I had no qualms to this. With the way things have been lately, we haven't had much opportunity to give back as much as we want.

After a quick trip to the dog park where Chloe got hit in the head with a basketball while trying to mimic Air Bud, we went to the commissary to do our grocery shopping for the week. Since I already had a lot of our ingredients for next week's menu plan, we only spent 30 minutes and $24.59. We also got a whole wad of commissary and manufacturer's coupons, probably more in value than what we spent. I'll break all it down in detail in a separate post, but all-in-all I am -very- proud of myself for this run.

It was 4pm after we dropped everything off and finally managed to get out to our local outlet mall. My precious beautiful Guess sunglasses and watch got lost in the move, so I've been desperately needing replacements. I tried to find some at the NEX since this is where I got the original set, but no such luck. I am hoping that during our declutter, they will turn up, but in the meantime, I needed a cheaper solution. So off to the mall we go.

Considering the fact that this was an outlet mall and I haven't been to a mall in a good 4 months, I think I showed considerable restraint by sticking to things we needed and only buying them at a bargain price. I found my watch at Fossil for $21.49, and sunglasses at Claire's for $9.14. I also needed some pepper spray for piece of mind, and managed to grab a pink one at Outdoor World for $12.89. The areas around the base is not what I would call prime real estate (as expected), and although I run all of my errands in broad daylight, there have been some situations where I would have liked one hand wrapped around some pepper spray.

Now, generally speaking the little princess does not need more clothes - but I wanted to buy her bottoms (pants/skirts) so she can start wearing onesies out of the house instead of strict outfits. Oshkosh and the Children's Place were having some INCREDIBLE sales. Between the two stores, I got her 6 pairs of bottoms and a swim suit for a total of $19.27, or around $2.75 each - a better price than thrift/consignment store prices!

By 7:30pm, we were done with the mall, and headed over to Walmart and Target to get some household supplies. I was starving at this point, having had no real food whatsoever since 7:30am. We tried to go to Sam's Club for some pizza, but they were closed, and in my hunger-induced madness, I decided we should go to Denny's instead of attempting to go home and cook dinner at 9pm. Denny's was $35.60, and this really was the only place where I think we failed. This could have been avoided had we just eaten at 4pm before we went to the mall, but rest assured, I've learned my lesson and will avoid this in the future.

It was 10:30pm by the time we got home, and all we managed to do before collapsing was to take the dogs out, bathe the baby, and put our shopping away. All-in-all, I think we did pretty good for a Saturday. We were exhausted, but at least we got a lot of errands done.

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