Weekend and Monday

This weekend was the chili cook off at church. mister studly enters his chili every year and always takes some place in the contest. the first couple years, he took first but the last couple, he's only gotten second. Well, he regained his title and is the first place winner again. woo hoo! so he got the burnt spoon award and came home and put it on the shelves in our living room. it's funny. we also got our new freezer this weekend from my dad. he gave us his old one and we were so excited. we had been thinking about buying one ourselves, but free is always better. so today i went grocery shopping and did my coupon shopping. i am doing really good at getting my food storage together. mister studly and his friend are going to build me a shelving unit to go in my closet downstairs that is a can rotator as well. it's going to be sweet! anyways.. back to the shopping.... i went to a couple different stores. at Ralph's, i did really well. i got 55 bucks worth of groceries for only 16 bucks!! WOW. i didn't do as well at the other store but i still saved quite a bit. here's what i got this week.....
again, green items were free, black items were sale and coupon items and red items are regular priced items. (there are no regular priced items this week that i purchased.)

5 twelve packs of diet soda- normally, i would never buy this much soda, but it was an AWESOME deal and mister studly said to take advantage. it was 5 twelve packs of Pepsi products for 10 bucks! whoa mama!!
2 bounty paper towels
1 mitchem deodorant
1 ummmm personal product
1 multi grain cheerios
1 dole jar tropical fruit
2 pkgs cough drops
4 Cornish game hens
1 family pack boneless pork chops
1 pkg craisins
1 32oz. powerade zero
1 box couscous
8 cans Campbell's chunky healthy request soups
1.3 lbs tomatoes
3.2 lbs bananas
2.43 lbs cantaloupe
1 pot roast
2 GUM toothbrushes
2 atkins snack bars

122.47- in groceries
51.74- amount actually paid including tax

this is really good because my budget this week was 80 bucks according to muster studly. so i came in quite a bit under budget. i like to wait to give the checker my club card until she has rung everything up and then watch it go down and then hand her my coupons and watch it go down even further. today the checker was the manager and she watched the price go down down down after the deductions with me and when it was finally done she said "Wow! that went down A LOT!" and i was like "i know! I'm so excited!!". the man behind me was totally impressed too. i saw him make the "wow... this lady knows what she's doing!" face. i walked out of there feeling pretty good about myself. i called my sister in law c in Virgina and she answered the phone "some one must have done their shopping!" i guess since she figured we had already talked today that i must be calling her to tell her about my awesome deals. she calls me after she shops too. she does the grocery game with me so it's fun to hear about all her deals she gets as well. she was telling me today that her food storage is getting better too. underneath her bed and her daughters bed is full of food storage. for me, my benches are filling up (actually i can't fit any more in them so i'm going to have to find another place soon). i have a lot of storage underneath the benches in my dining set. but eventually, I'm going to clean out the coat closet down stairs and turn that into food storage and use the benches for our games and extra kitchen stuff. anyways, i feel really good about finally working towards getting my food storage done. it has been something that has always weighed on me and I'm so glad that I've found a way to get it done cheaply. it's been really great. oh... and for those of my readers that are not members f the LDS church. it is recommend to have a supply of food in our homes in case of emergency. it's all about being prepared for whatever might come like natural disasters and stuff. my mother and father in law were out of work for awhile when the kids were little. they went through their supply of food storage and were able to survive for four months while my father in law was out of work. so it's not always for the BIG natural disaster type stuff, it can also be there for when life just doesn't go your way. you can be prepared if you work at it and I'm FINALLY working at it. Yahoo!!