"You just put your pickle on everyone's plate, College Boy, and leave the hard stuff to me"

I seem to concoct a million ideas for projects to start that will confine me to a specific container of time all arriving at a refreshing and life-altering goal. I assumed I could blog about this. My first brilliant idea began with the Julie and Julia project sans all 524 recipe’s from Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking cookbook, both volumes. I planned to simply blog. So far, so good, although I don’t get the motivation to blog quite as often as I like, and experience tells me that if you force yourself to do something that pretty much zaps all of the fun out of it. I’m inspired by quirkiness, random ideas, emotions. Without those my mind draws a complete blank. In any case, another genius idea was to live up to my beloved nickname of Coupon Whore and to only buy things that are on sale AND that I have a coupon for. Then my mind immediately began sifting through all the things that I typically need that I can never find on sale or even an expired coupon for. An example you wonder, well, how about ham cubes. There is this lovely Parmesan Tortellini Salad that I make with divine cheese or spinach-stuffed tortellini, frozen peas, parmesan cheese, and ham cubes, just to name a few savory ingredients. I’ve never seen a ham cube coupon and as I type this I realize that I have to stop myself because I told you I’d offer you an example of items that I could neither get on sale nor find coupons for and I’m just recalling that I purchased 2 packages of ham cubes at Food Lion about a week ago because they were on sale 2 for the bargain price of $4.00. Shoot. Let's re-think this......... Ok, because nothing is coming to me, I will simply justify this rant by saying that even if this were a possible feat, and we are soon to find out, this art of being a coupon whore really boils down to a race against time on various levels; time that is required for perusing through the Sunday paper circulars in search of these coupons and their accompanying sales. You need time to compare prices to make certain that you are getting the best possible deal because what’s the point of being a coupon whore when you find that $.25 coupon off Dawn dish detergent and Walgreens is running a sale on them for $.99 along with Kroger however, Kroger doubles manufacturer coupons up to a $.50 face value making the item a coupon whore’s wet dream, FREE! Actually if you purchase this item with the minimum of one other item and take into consideration the fact that your coupon for Dawn dish detergent is technically $1.00, Kroger pays $.01 of your other groceries as well. Let's not omit the race against the ticking clock; couponing in this manner is also a matter of timing things just perfectly, after all when Wisk detergent is only on sale every 6 weeks to accommodate the coupon that you have which runs out in 4 weeks, keeping in mind the fact that your personal bottle of Wisk contains only one mere orange capful of detergent left to which you just added this to your weekly load of bed sheet washing and your husband has just brought home his clothes from the gym, as you adhere to such a stringent coupon/sale marriage, you could be caught in quite the pickle. We can only hope that jar of dills is on sale this week.