Coupon Crazy

   I don’t know about you, but we are always looking to save a buck. I have no problem admitting that like a good portion of Americans we currently live paycheck to paycheck. With Clarissa in school, student loans and cost of living expenses things can get a little hairy at times. We have had to learn to cut costs where we can. This means couponing. 

      Now I have never been one to coupon. I’ve actually always associated it with grandmothers and big families. However, money is money so when I heard that one of my work colleague cut her grocery bills in half I was ready to jump on the bandwagon. Her method, which she learned about in a class, is simple. It’s based around the theory that, “if you don’t see it, you won’t know you have it.” To start all you need is a 3 ring binder, some baseball card holder pages, page dividers and a Sunday paper. Put the baseball pages in your binder and divide the sections however you want. My work friend’s binder is super specific. She has sections for bread, milk, sauces, meat, veggies and so on. I went a little less specific for our book. I categorized my sections based on the aisles of the grocery store I frequent the most. The best part is you can do whatever works best for you. I actually had to change mine around after my first few shopping trips because I realized I could make my trip flow faster by rearranging. Next, cut out all the coupons from your Sunday paper, even the ones you think you would never use. Believe me you’ll be kicking yourself if you find out you threw away a coupon for an item you could have got for free with it. Finally, put the coupons in the baseball card pages based on the sections you created for yourself. Every Sunday I buy a paper and cut out the coupons while I watch football. Then as I insert them into my book I scan my sections for expired ones. Normally there aren’t that many. The whole process takes me between 20 minutes to an hour based on the volume of new coupons I have.

     Now that you have a place to keep your coupons, you’re ready to shop. The idea behind saving a lot of money is to combine coupon savings with sales. I use an internet site called Southern Savers to find out the best deals in my area, but I would reason to bet that there is someone in your area that runs a similar site. I also joined the email club for my grocery store. They send me their weekly ads and special offers. My grocery store also offers double coupons up to .99 cents everyday and often runs deals where they triple your savings. People always comment that we must buy a lot of things we don’t need and honestly we went a little crazy at first because we could get things we could never afford in the past. Over time we learned to stock up on certain items like canned goods, soup broths, dressings, marinades and cleaning items. We only buy the perishable items that we really need to get us through a two-week span. Now I refuse to spend more than fifty cents for most of the items I just listed. Clarissa and I both have a blast trying to figure out how we can get the stuff we want for the cheapest price. Lately I started making a list of the things we want most so that we have an idea of how much we’re going to spend per trip. I loaded all my info into an excel spreadsheet and it does all the calculations for me. Thank God because I really stink in the math department.

    During our most recent trip we purchased $158 worth of groceries and spent $46. This also included some items that weren’t on my list that Clarissa snuck in like beer, sodas, ground beef and some other non coupon items. We figured out that these came out to roughly $15 bucks so without them we would have paid $31 bucks for $143 dollars worth of stuff. Now tell me you couldn’t spend an hour a week to save money like that? You should try it. I promise your wallets will thank me.

Meet Trouble

Yesterday I wrote about my mini photo session with Drake. Well these are the photos of his other half, Wheaton, who happens to be our problem pet. We adopted her about 6 years ago from animal control in Wilmington and if I’m being honest, I didn’t want her. (In my defense it wasn’t that I didn’t want her, it was that I always wanted a bigger dog.) Clarissa will joke and tell people she’s my dog, but we both know Wheaton had her hooked from day one. Clarissa still tells the story about how Wheaton licked her face as she held her the whole way home from the pound. The vet told us she looked about a year old and that she was part Wheaten terrier, hence the name. (The other choices were Old Scratch and Scrappy Doo so I really think we dodged a bullet on that one.) Although be aware that at times she may answer to the aliases The Wheatmonster, Wheaty Peety Pants, Wilma Washpan Joe,  Wheaty, My Wheatpea and Now.

   We think that whoever had Wheaton first abused her. When we first brought her home all you had to do was look at her the wrong way and she would tuck her tail and run leaving a little trail of piddle in her wake. We also can only guess at the fact that her first family had children who did some of the abusing because to this day we can’t trust her in a room with kids. However, I’m happy to say that she’s outgrown much of her original fear. Clarissa and I pick that Wheaton has 9 lives because she has been hit by both a car and a dump truck and jumped out of the window of a moving car. Her worst injury was an amputated toe that the vet said would never grow back, but it did. She is a great guard dog seeing as she barks at people, cars, animals, and sometimes nothing at all. I like to imagine she just really likes the sound of her own voice. However for all her faults Wheaton is one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever met. She loves to cuddle and has this amazing ability to weasel her way under whatever covers you may have. She thinks clothing for dogs is ridiculous and will refuse to move if subjected to wearing anything but a collar. She spends countless hours trying to figure out what that long, hairy thing is attached to her butt and works tirelessly to catch it. She also loves to watch both Clarissa and I throw things for her and then follow us while we go to fetch them and we both agree that she must have been an otter in a past life because if there is water nearby she will find it and get in it. Looking back now I think that despite all her quirks I think we can both agree that Wheaton was a great addition to our family.

   Unlike Drake, Wheaton will go out of her way to avoid the camera. If you look closely you can kind of see her little mohawk. She’s always game for a new hairdo. Most people don’t know it, but Wheaton is a big sports fan and during March Madness she traditionally has the words Go and Duke shaved on her sides. Well except for one sad year when I had a dyslexic moment and made the D backward so instead she said Duke and Dog. (Luckily, I don’t think she can read.)

Photo Session Sunday

   My photo session for this weekend was cancelled due to rain so I needed something to do indoors. Thank heavens I have dogs because they are (almost)always willing participants. Let’s just say that Wheaton was a bit more frustrating than her brother, but you get to see those photos tomorrow. I wanted to try shooting in low light and since Drake is dark it makes it even more challenging. People always ask how I take the photos I do or comment about how expensive my camera must be, but the truth is anyone could take photos like these with any point and shoot camera. Simply turn off your flash, light your subject from behind or the side with a desk light and get down on their level. I promise you’ll get some good ones. Happy shooting!

 

SUMO SUNDAY

   I always knew my friends were crazy! I guess that’s why I love them all so much. This is precisely why I didn’t bat an eye when my buddy Dawn said she had rented sumo suits for a get together she was having. No one throws a party like Dawn does! She made medals (well, convinced her mom to make them), a podium and cooked for everyone. She even researched the Japanese symbol for sumo seen on the medals below.

      

  According to Dawn, proper headgear is always important! Even her dog, Owen, got in on the action. It smushes your face together like crazy.

    I swear I have been looking forward to this event for the last 2 months and it did not disappoint. It’s been 4 days and I don’t know if my stomach still hurts from wrestling myself or from laughing so hard as I watched everyone else do it. Dawn and Ashley kicked off the day in the first bought. We quickly realized that suiting up was best done in groups as the costumes could get a little unwieldy at times. I think the 40 or so onlookers would agree with me when I say that this match may have to be one of the most entertaining things I have ever seen. I nearly peed my pants from laughter. This was a quick one though because Dawn is surprisingly bad at sumo wrestling. Hmmm, who would have known?

 It was almost as fun watching these guys suit up as it was to watch the battle. The taller people made me smile because their legs stuck out all spindly from beneath the huge bellies.

 

      

Closing Time

     

   My petstore is closing! (I’m making a boo boo face) I guess I should be sad that I’m losing a job, but in all honesty that part doesn’t really affect me all that much. The part that does bite though is that I feel like I’m losing my fun. It sounds weird I know, but I really look forward to my weekly shift. My fellow associates and I have built friendships through the crazy times. Above all I will miss hanging out with those guys more than anything else.

    The store will be closing at the end of the month so everything was marked down by at least 25%. The only problem with this is that we already had enough nut jobs come in before this massive sale, so imagine the fun we’re having now. This past Saturday I brought the camera with me to document some of my favorites. I swear I hadn’t been in the store 5 minutes before I had my first dumb question of the day. (You know those people who say there is no such thing as a stupid question? They’re lying!) This lady comes up and says, “Why is everything on sale?” Now you all saw the first picture I had up right? You know the one that showed the front of the store with the 18 large, bright yellow signs that say STORE CLOSING everything on sale? So I was tempted to tell the woman it was because it was 12:05 on a Saturday and we were going to have everything on sale for a total of 15 minutes so she better hurry, but I refrained. Instead I decided to be nice and point out those bright signs and wander off to take some aspirin.

  

    I know it’s a stupid picture people, but I am building a story with photos here people so get over it. Plus, these little puppies were a life saver because that lady above was one of about 30 people who asked that very same question during my 6 hour shift. While we’re on the subject of stupid questions it would be a shame not to mention, “How many hamsters can I fit in a shoebox, Can I leave my parakeet outside for the winter and It’s alright if I put 12 goldfish in this 1 gallon bowl, right?” There were also a lot of people who seemed to be under the impression that this afternoon we were playing let’s make a deal because they kept trying to bargain for certain items. For instance, “Hey Lady, I’ll take this fish tank off your hands if you can knock an additional 25 percent off.” Me “Uh, how about NO!” Obviously it was a day filled with geniuses.

   I would be lying if I said that every customer was a pain in the butt. There were plenty of people who seemed genuinely sad to see us close and all of us were more than happy to help those folks find some great deals. The problem is that it’s always easier to remember the jerks as opposed to the nice people. I know the customer is always supposed to be right, but all too often they’re wrong. I don’t know what it is about retail that brings out the worst in individuals? I mean I was raised to treat everybody with respect whether they were a cashier at McDonald’s or held a PhD, but clearly that’s not the case with the rest of society. Needless to say I have no problem telling you all the next story because these people were some real winners in the class department. Whenever we sell a large item we always try to make certain that the customer understands the space it’s going to take to get said item home. One would imagine that someone could see on their own that a 6 ft tall cat condo probably wouldn’t fit in a Toyota Tercel, but you would be amazed! So when a family came in on Saturday and demanded we sell them our last cat tree the first question we asked was, “What are you driving?” They said they had a van and so then we asked them if they would have room in it. They basically told us to stop hassling them so we went ahead and sold it to them.

     This is Tyler holding the cat condo as the customers realized there was no way in hell that it was going to fit in their vehicle. I would show you the picture of their poor little kid smushed in his car seat with all the brick-a-brack from the car on top of him, but I think that’s a little to mean even for me. They informed Tyler that they were going to need some rope and were furious when he told them that not only did we not have any, but even if we did, he couldn’t give it to them. I think we all felt a little sorry for them as we watched them struggle for about 40 minutes to figure it out, but then we laughed and chalked it up to karma.

     On a normal Saturday we do about $4,000 in sales. When I left at 6 on this Saturday, we were at $9,500. Remember too that everything was 25% off. By the end of the day I think we were all feeling a little crazy ourselves. We’ve been trying to sell this ridiculously expensive, shedding toy dog seen in the pic above for about as long as I have been with the pet store. If you would like to buy him, or anything else in the store for that matter swing by this weekend or it may be too late. We would hate for you all to miss out on the crazy fun we are all having.

( P.S. This is Tyler’s crazy fun face, in case you couldn’t tell)

The Thug Life

   So we have this park that we go to all the time. It’s perfect for us. It’s less than 10 minutes from the house, it has tennis courts (for the 4 times a year we decide to play), a lake, and a covered picnic area with a grill. Yeah so upon closer examination it sounds like every park I’ve ever been too, but whatever. It works for us, okay? Well, we frequent this park at least 2 times a week and rarely see anyone else using it  (other than the tennis courts) which makes it even better since I don’t like competing for space. There is a story behind all this chatter people, it’s just gonna take a second alright so hold your horses? If there are too many words for you just forget I even started and skim the pictures. Don’t worry, I won’t judge, even my mom’s admitted that this is what she does and I still love her. 

   Now to really tell this story properly I’m going to have to let you on some background details. One of these details is that Clarissa tends to go through these short lasted kicks (boxing, chess, BMX trick riding, video games, guitar…) These hobbies always come and go on a whim with no real reasoning behind how they start and stop, but while in the present they are always full steam ahead. Sometimes the activity fades from glory never to be seen again, (BMX) where other times they resurface much like the current hobby, fishing. Needless to say it works out great that we can go to our little park with the dogs and she can do her thing. The only problem with this newly rejuvenated hobby is that she can’t/won’t go by herself. The reason? She doesn’t like to take the fish off the hook. Can you guess who gets to go along for this fun task? So now I get to add “Official Fish Unhooker” to my current resume besides partner, confidant, friend, sounding board, laugh machine and a litany of others [Side note: when I read this part to Clarissa she rolled her eyes and said, "You think really highly of yourself don't you?" She followed that up with, "I'm glad one of us does." You see what I am dealing with here, right people?] 

    So today we headed over to our park so I could catch up on my recreational reading (If it has the word recreational in it must be a sport right?) and so Clarissa could throw it in a few times. Really I think the whole thing smelled a little fishy since it normally drives Clarissa crazy when I’m reading and she isn’t. (This is the second important background detail so pay attention) I can get lost in a book fast, oblivious to the outside world, like a big bump on a log who doesn’t want to move till the last page has been turned. Needless to say I was feeling a bribe was involved when Clarissa said, “Hey, you want to go to the park and read?” Well….who am I to turn down a good offer? I jumped on board. What I didn’t realize when I signed on for the afternoon was that I was going to get a little more excitement than I bargained for.

     We hauled all our essentials down to the water’s edge, let the dogs loose and set up shop. However, I decided to move out from behind Clarissa and over to her side after watching her cast her junior Transformer fishing pole and catch the back of her chair then look around wildly because she couldn’t figure out where it went. I can’t say why, but I felt a little safer sitting 5 feet away. I settled in and about 10 minutes later I was dead to the world reading my book.

     I think about 45 minutes passed before I started to get that eerie feeling that  someone was watching us. I looked around only to notice that Clarissa was wearing these gargantuan headphones. They are the noise cancelling type and she uses them to hear background music when she’s recording on her drums, but I never thought she would actually venture out of the house with them.  Apparently I thought wrong because there she was sitting 5 feet away rocking out to her ipod while fishing. (Another one of those important details is because of the drums I have gotten really good at ignoring noises that would bother other people.) Who am I to judge though, so I had a laugh and was about to dive back into my book when I noticed a little gaggle of people over on the tennis courts peering through the trees in our direction.

           I looked around and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary nearby. I was about to shake Clarissa and ask her if she knew why these people were ogling at us when out of the blue she busts out with a pitchy little piece of whatever hip hop song she’s listening to at like the top of her lungs, “YEAH, YEAH THAT’S GANGSTA, I THINK I’MA ROLL WITH THAT ONE.” [I later found out this came from Jay-Z's song 1-900-hustler. Yes, that is it's actual name...I checked her ipod because I didn't believe her either.]  It seems that while I was lost in my book Clarissa has been shouting out random lines to the songs on her playlist. The problem lies in the fact that she really only listens to hip hop and rap and she really only memorizes the most common lines to these songs which normally aren’t light on the swear words. I’m guessing that the tennis players got quite a show from Ms. Clarissa.

     I start laughing to myself and forming a blog post in my head as I grab my camera and shoot some quick photos while Clarissa continues to belt out a series of thug lovin’ little ditties. Since it was a little chilly in the shade I had worn a hoodie to the park and I get this idea to pull up my hood like the gangstas do and take a photo of myself so I can later refer to myself as part of Clarissa’s posse in my post. This is the moment Clarissa decides to turn around and she says in this exasperated voice, “Are you taking a picture of yourself? How many photos do you really need of just you?” As if she finds it embarrassing to be seen with me while I am taking pictures of myself.  Are you kidding me??? [Upon closer review of these photos perhaps I should have been even more embarrassed by the fact Clarissa's shirt is inside out.]

This is my, “It’s a Thug’s Life,” shot that Clarissa teased me about.  Honestly, I had to take a couple because I could NOT keep a straight face for this one and I really wanted it to say Bad Ass. I think I failed since it says bored to me.

    This is when Clarissa realized how loud she was singing! I kept trying to get her to take a bow to the onlookers for her impromptu show, but she refused.  

 

 I know there are a lot of pics of C but she will rarely let me shoot her so I had to take advantage of the moment. These next two are my favorites from the whole day. This one is typical because my instructions were to be serious.

Nontraditional Traditions

       

    This is Wheaton laying by the fire. She loves to be warm, but I am always worried she’s going to catch her tail on fire.

 

    Every year around this time Clarissa and I carve pumpkins. It started a little over 7 years ago and has become one of our many traditions. As soon as the weather turns cool and the leaves start changing I start looking forward to it. However, unlike most people our traditions always seem a little haphazard. Some people are planners. You know the type, they can look at the calendar, blackberry or even the stars and tell you that at 9pm on Oct 9th they will be carving pumpkins with Sally and Suzie. Those of you who know us can attest to the fact that we are not those people! As a matter of fact we rarely know what we will be doing until we are on our way to do it.

      I think that having no rules to this tradition is what helps keep it fresh and exciting year after year. Sometimes we carve with friends, sometimes by ourselves. Some years we make a big deal of picking out the perfect pumpkins at a little patch together, where some years it’s a sporadic afterthought. For instance this year Clarissa surprised me with 2 small pumpkins on a random Tuesday night in September from the local grocery store. Some years they get carved in September, sometimes on Halloween night. There was even a year where we had to rename them Thanksgiving pumpkins because we didn’t get around to carving them until the middle of November. The point is that it’s an event that has followed us through 3 different cities and to 4 different homes. Most importantly it’s something we always do together (even if one of us gets mad and gives up early because they chose a ridiculously complicated carving pattern). I know that I look forward to seeing the pumpkins that will carry us through the next 7 years and more. These are the photos from our first ever pumpkin carving night. I know the photography isn’t great, but I can still remember it like yesterday. (I was going to have to learn to use our scanner and I was putting off posting because of laziness when Clarissa suggested I just take a photo of them. I knew I kept her around for something!)

Christmas and Ice Cream

   Most days around 7 o’clock those of us that live in my apartment complex celebrate Christmas. I know it seems weird. Believe me it took some getting used too, but now it feels almost normal. Why do we do this? Well, because it’s fun! You see, every day the ice cream truck visits our neighborhood and while it’s there it blasts Christmas songs from the bullhorns mounted to its roof. Clearly the gentleman that drives the truck has no idea that the songs he’s playing are normally associated with thoughts of cold and winter instead of ice cream and summer, but hey it works for him.  What’s absolutely hysterical about the whole thing is that you would imagine it would at least be fun and upbeat songs of the season, but it’s not. You are just as likely to hear Silent Night, or O Little Town of Bethlehem as you are Joy to the World. After chasing him down the other day to take this photo I was astounded to see that he has this gem of a vehicle up for sale. I wonder why?

       I know these photos aren’t the best, but after stalking the truck for 2 different days and only coming up with these I gave up. One would imagine that it would drive slowly, but that thing can motor. Plus I started to feel kinda creepy following around an ice cream truck, so this is what you get.

Redneck Karaoke

    

       In case you don’t know, I drive a 1983 Toyota Pickup truck that Clarissa and I painted camouflage (that’s another  story)…. Since my radio doesn’t work I have to find ways to entertain myself when I’m on the road (and you wondered why I am so good at imitating people). So there I was singing a song at the top of my lungs driving through downtown Durham when I realize that the car full of gangstas next to me were staring me down.  It didn’t help that it happened to be a song from the Rent soundtrack (everyone knows showtunes are the best sing-a-long songs) instead of something cool like Beyonce or T-Pain…. Anyways you know how you have that moment of realization where you have to decide if you should acknowledge the people staring at you or keep singing? Well I shrugged my shoulders and kept belting it out. They drove off laughing like hell with a story of their very own.

  Side Bar: I brought Wheaton along on my photo shoot. She loves to sit in the back of the truck and bark at everything that goes by. No, I do not let her ride back there while I am actually driving. Seeing as Wheaton has jumped out of the window of a moving vehicle and been hit by both a car and a dump truck, (she only suffered a broken toe) I don’t think that would be in her best interest.

Venom Kills

     

       It seems most people normally react in one of three ways when I talk about rugby. My favorite reaction is the blank stare and then a smile. I know that when I said the word their brain immediately went into overdrive running through their lexicon of words thinking, “Rugby….rugby? Wow, is that really a sport or is she just screwing with me? Isn’t that the one with the flat bat that they play over in England? No…crap! Smile, just smile and say yes she’ll never know you don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.” Then you get those people who associate rugby with blood sports. Mothers and grandmothers normally fall into this category. You say the word rugby and a second later they are cringing as they say, “Isn’t that a really dangerous game? or I don’t want you playing that, you have such nice teeth!” As if you’ve just declared that you want to participate in no-holds barred boxing or something. Finally, there are those people who can identify that it is indeed a sport either because they’re foreign and they play weird sports like rugby in other countries, watched it late one night while channel surfing or better yet  played it themselves.  I happen to love all things rugby. That’s why I followed one of my best friends, Dawn, out to the Poole Road Rugby Complex on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to watch some of her friends who compete for the Venom, a women’s team based out of Raleigh.

 

   This particular afternoon The Venom took on a team from the University of Maryland and ran away with an 18-10 win. Frankly the game never even felt close. The Venom scored minutes into the first half and never looked back. I would explain the rules of rugby here, but I’m going to take a wild guess and say that most of you that read this blog could care less. Also, if I’m being honest I don’t think I even know all the rules. I played for almost 2 years and I can explain the basics, but I get a little fuzzy on the details. However, the idea is you tackle the person holding the ball, but seeing as most of you have passed the first grade I’m gonna take a stab in the dark and say you already figured that much out.  Anyways, these ladies rock and you should certainly check them out. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed!

 This shot below makes me laugh because when you are playing and you finally get the ball and look up and see nearly 30 people running at you there is moment where your brain screams, RUN! This is what that moment looks like.