In the Club

7 AM didn't really happen yesterday morning. Missed the alarm again, but only by like a half-hour or so.

I got up at 7:30, had breakfast, and read the news. Then, Meg and headed to the hospital for our monthly growth scan.

Baby D is doing fine. She was 2 lbs 9 oz right now. Her growth rate is where it should be. She is breech (upside down--or is it right-side up? Let's say, feet down) right now, but this is not a concern until the end, as she is still able to move around a lot. She was much more cooperative this time, and the technician was able to get all of the measurements she needed. No pictures though, she was very 'business-like,' and did not print any.

After the scan, we had lunch, and watched some more of Seinfeld: Season 5. After lunch, I started to make the grocery list, and then got involved in a tangent that took pretty much the rest of the afternoon

As it is the end of the month, our grocery budget was low. I wanted to make it a goal this month to find a way to stick to it, since we always go over. So, what I did was start by making a simple spreadsheet of everything we needed. Then, I went through old receipts, and put in prices for the things we needed, since we pretty much buy the same things. Then, I had it total up everything. This way, I could make our list according to our budget. This seemed like a good thing, and I got the idea to switch to making our regular shopping lists in Calc (OpenOffice.org's version of Excel). So I added to this list everything we ever buy, and went through old receipts, adding prices for as many things as I can find. Then, when you make the list, all you have to do is type a number in the "Qty" column, and it totals up everything you are going to buy, including sales tax! Pretty cool. So now the problems: I ended up with a list of like 200 things that we could possibly buy. And the idea is that we can continue to add to this list. Well, it seemed silly to have to print out a few pages for one trip, when really, we probably only by 30 or so items in a trip. So, I found out a way to filter out all of the items we didn't need for the shopping trip. Great! Now, I can work it, but my next problem was to make it more user-friendly for Meg. I was trying to record macros (small programs to automate tasks) to make things faster. I was able to successfully program one to sort the list by aisle and one to clear out all of the numbers in the "Qty" column to start a new list. I was working on one to automate the filtering process, and I just could not get it to work. I posted my problem to the OpenOffice.org Forum, and found out you need to know some advanced stuff about programming language to do this. I think it would be cool to program stuff, but apparently I know nothing. I was looking over help guides to do this, and I might as well be reading German. So, I gave up on that. But the rest of the file is cool, and should make grocery shopping easier, and help us stick to our budget.

Speaking of groceries, I am now part of the "club," Sam Walton's club that is. My mom has been a member of BJ's (another wholesale club) for a while, and I have always been impressed with what you could buy in bulk. However, I never wanted to join a wholesale club before, because A) I thought the membership was really expensive, and B) I didn't think we'd be able to use everything we bought in bulk. Well, I found out the membership was only $40 a year for two cards!

So, we decided to check it out last night. Just on the meat prices alone, we will definitely save more than $40 a year. Plus, they have diapers, and a lot of other stuff that can easily be bought in bulk.

So, we signed up. I've got my own Sam's Club card now-- Complete with bad ID picture.



After Sam's Club, we went over to Wal-Mart (boy, the Walton family can eat tonight), and did our regular grocery shopping, and actually were UNDER the amount that I had predicted. Woo-Hoo, we actually stuck to our grocery budget this month!

We got home, and I toyed around more the the grocery program, and then gave up and went to bed.