I think it’s about time I start rethinking which grocery store I’m shopping at again.  We almost always shop at Ingles because it’s the only grocery store in our town.  We could drive out of our way to do our shopping at Walmart (bleh), Bloom, or Bi-lo in another town, but Ingles most of the time has the cheapest prices anyway.

I’m about ready to make it a point to drive out of my way to Bloom or Bi-lo and pay the higher prices because I’m getting sick of Ingles.  I’ve already complained twice about finding too many items sitting on the shelves that are out of date, and I think I’m going to have to do it again.  I’ve gotten to a point where I try to remember to triple check sell by dates on most of the dairy because if it’s not already out of date it’s going to go bad in just a couple days.  I even joked to Hubby that maybe I need to get on the ball checking out life insurance rates because I think Ingles is trying to kill me with a food born illness!

Last week I returned 4 containers of Laura Lynn single serve yogurt and 1 container of Laura Lynn sour cream because I got home and found them expired.  The sour cream had been expired for more than a week!  Most of the time I don’t have to worry about sour cream expiring for a month.  At first I thought maybe it was just the Laura Lynn products that were expiring but that’s not the case.  Yesterday I had to search through half a shelf of Philadelphia cream cheese before I found two packages that weren’t expiring before September 29.  If I were going to use the cream cheese immediately it wouldn’t be an issue, but I know I won’t be using them until later in the week.

While I was looking for cream cheese Hubby picked up the plain yogurt that we add to Bubba’s food.  I used to buy the single serve packages because we only use 2 Tbsp a day, but Ingles no longer carries plain yogurt in single serving cups.  Now I have to buy it in the 32oz size.  It’ll last us a lot longer, but with the sell by dates expiring on everything I’m almost afraid to buy it at all.  Sure enough when I went to mix his food I discovered the sell by date is October 2.  There’s no way we’ll use even half of it by then!

It’s bad enough we’re paying out the ass for groceries in this economy, but I’d at least like the products I buy to last more than a few days.  We didn’t have this problem until recently, so it makes me wonder if people are buying diary items less causing them to sit on the shelf longer or if Ingles isn’t rotating the stock like they should be.  It’s like the milk guy used to stock it from the back of the cooler where the newer stuff went behind the stuff that needed to sell first.  Now you always see him out in front of the cooler slamming jugs on the shelf without paying attention.

I understand it’s perfectly ok to sell something up until that date printed on the packaging, but you’d hope a store would be paying attention to these things.  I guess not, and that’s why I’m finding so many that are still sitting there well past the expiration date.

There is nothing I hate doing on a Sunday morning than fudging the budget to make sure bills get paid this week.  My crazy mother may really be crazy, but at least she was always right when she taught us money is the root of all evil. lol.  Today I totally feel that way especially since I’m getting used to a new “system”. 

I’m having to rearrange my entire budget, when and how things get paid, and all that good stuff because Hubby’s boss is changing the way he gets paid. They’ve switched to an every 2 week pay period, and the way it worked out Hubby ended up with a very small paycheck last week after returning to work at the end of the pay period, and now we’ll have a big gap before the next payday.  Thank goodness my pay period for some of the work I do online happens to fall on the opposite weeks as his payday, so that definitely helped out.  I’ll have gas money and grocery money to last us for the week if I don’t splurge.

I did do a little splurging last night when I decided to order pizza, but I took advantage of a coupon that essentially got us 2 medium 2 topping pizzas and 2 orders of cheesy bread for about $20 after delivery and tip.  Considering we’ll be eating on that pizza for the rest of the weekend (and probably still have some left over Monday) it’s worth it to me. Of course I’ll be needing an acne treatment after all that grease, but it’s so worth it right now. My pregnancy stomach can hold such small amounts of food now that all my food “rules” have gone out the window. I keep telling myself it can’t hurt me if I can’t eat much of it!

Anywho I guess I need to get back to my budget.  Then I’ve got to make a run to the grocery store for this week’s essentials while I put Hubby to cleaning.  I’ve got a long list for him today, but it mostly consists of things I just can’t physically do anymore.  You never realize how much bending, lifting, and hands and knees stuff you do in your daily life until you can’t physically do it anymore.  Thank goodness my baby girl will be here in just a few short weeks, and I’ll be running myself to death and back to a normal body!

There’s one thing I’m definitely not going to miss about being pregnant (other than peeing on myself every single time I sneeze), and that’s the wild dreams.  I’ve had the pregnancy related dreaming for awhile, but I feel like the weirdness has tripled during the last couple weeks.

As usual I didn’t sleep very well last night with Hubby in bed, so I slept off and on all morning when I would get a chance.  Every time I laid down I found myself waking up to some weird show in my head.  There was the one where my baby’s hair was pretty rainbow colors at birth. 

Later in the morning I dreamed I gained so much weight during my last month that I was too fat for our bed.  The only thing I could sleep on was a hospital bed.  Actually it was more like one of those power exam tables because I was too fat for bed rails.

During my last dream I was giving birth in a room that was on fire, but I have a feeling I know where that one came from.  I woke up pouring sweat because of the 70lbs of radiating bulldog I found snuggled in next to me.  The poor guy was cold because I’ve had the ac set to meat locker mode the last few days.  Even Hubby (who normally gladly sets the ac at 50 mid-summer) has been walking around in sweats complaining about the icicles he swears he sees forming on his fingertips, but I can’t help it.  My body is radiating, and it’s not happy that autumn arrived with a heatwave!

I’ve cooled off some, but I think I may still need to make my way into a cold shower in a bit.  I’m not really supposed to be showering anymore when I’m home alone, but because we have a bar in our shower for stability it’s a rule I’m breaking today.  I’m also breaking another rule I set for myself at the beginning of my pregnancy.  I’m craving ramen noodles, and I’m going to break down and have some.  I’ve been a good girl at avoiding all that sodium, so I don’t think one bowl is going to hurt me.

Yep, it’s still raining, and now it’s flooding, too.  I woke up this morning to the sound of a monsoon like downpour…the kind we normally associate with very tropical weather.  I looked out the bathroom window and found a good majority of our back yard to be under water.  The garden had turned into a pond, and even half of our front yard was flooded out.  It’s been years since we’ve had to worry about the front yard flooding, so I knew it’d done some heavy raining.

A good majority of the county is dealing with flooding right now, and Oconee County schools are running buses on a 2 hour delay in the morning.  Most of the damage is happening up in the mountains, and we happen to live right at the base of that.  Luckily the creek behind our house is as we call it “down in the holler” lol, so we don’t have to worry about flooding come off that creek.

According to WGOG someone reported receiving 6.8″ of rain in Walhalla between 7am yesterday and 12:30pm today.  I definitely believe it!  My mom called this morning to say there’s a massive land slide on her road (one road over from ours), so she couldn’t get out to go to church.  It wouldn’t have done her any good anyway because a couple larger creeks above between her house and the church were all flooded out.  Sertoma Field is completely under water as usual, but I’ve never seen it this bad.

Luckily the lower half of the county doesn’t seem to have been hit as hard.  When we headed to dinner some of the roads were even drying up, and it hardly rained on us at all.  We did a quick dinner at Fatz Cafe to celebrate our anniversary (6 years today), then we went to the store to pick up some stuff just in case the river floods later tonight.  We wouldn’t have to worry too much about the riving flooding us out of our house, but we’d have to worry about it flooding the road out preventing us from getting to town.

I decided to take advantage of some coupons I had for some new makeup now that my face is darkening because of the “pregnancy mask”.  I’ve been really self conscious about my face lately, and I’m hoping the new foundation will help out.  The darker tone to my skin is causing me to notice a ton of fine lines around my mouth and eyes.  I know I’m “only” 27, but it’s making me wonder if I should seriously start using some anti wrinkle cream. I figured that’s something I wouldn’t really start doing until I hit my 30s, but now I’m rethinking that.

We also hit up Kmart in search of a new pair of work boots for Hubby since he blew a hole in the bottom of his last week.  When I can afford it I need to order him a nice pair of boots instead of constantly buying him these cheap ones that wear out so quickly.

Anywho, all of our running around is done for the evening, and now I’m just happy to be back inside where it’s nice and dry.  I ended up bringing half my food home with me thanks to my squished up pregnant belly not letting me eat much in one sitting, and now I’m ready to go heat up the leftovers.  The rest of those jumbo fried shrimp are going to be really good right about now.