While I was out...

If I'm not going to do much in the way of new recipes this week, my posts may get a little random! Like this one.........

Today I went to the mall and to Sam's Club. The main purpose of my trip out there was to write down the prices of the things I tend to buy at Sam's Club and compare them to Wegmans to see if my membership there is really worth it. Of course it would have been more helpful to have completed this before I renewed my membership last week, but nonetheless, it will help me decide if I should renew it next year or not.

Wegmans seems to be quite competitive with Sam's for many things, but not all. Tomorrow night I will walk through Wegmans while DS is at Tae Kwon Do and write down their prices and do a comparison once I've gathered all my information. Can you tell I have a lot of time on my hands? Well, I do have the time and I do need to keep us on a budget, so I may as well do a little research. Eventually I hope to get to Giant and do some comparing there too.

I showed great restraint and walked out of Sam's spending only $20. I really only needed Halloween candy. I got one bag of 120 pieces for about $10. In Indiana, we lived in a neighborhood where we got 300-400 trick or treaters. I usually ended up spending close to $40-$50 for candy (we didn't live near a Sam's Club), so spending only $10 was kinda nice! I asked around and this neighborhood gets about 40. So, for $10, we can give each little goblin 2 pieces of decent candy instead of handing out one teeny tiny Tootsie Roll at a time for fear that we'll run out.
The other $10 went to my one and only impluse buy - a bag of Hershey's Almond Solitaires. Mmmm...these are good - and I'm not even a fan of Hershey's chocolate. I've tried quite a few different brands and have never been happy with them - except for one brand I bought online, but the price and shipping made them too expensive to buy regularly. I've tried some from Fresh Market, but the chocolate was a bit gritty. I tried some from Wegmans, but the chocolate had an unpleasant, plasticky coating. I know I tried a few others - can't remember the brands - but they were only okay.

These are quite good. The almonds are big and crunchy and the chocolate is rich and dark - the kind of dark that has a hint of espresso. Yum. If you like chocolate-covered almonds (mine have to be dark chocolate, no milk chocolate) and have a Sam's Club membership, you might want to run out and get some - the sign said they are a seasonal item. If you don't belong to Sam's but want to try them, I did find them on Amazon.

My other purchase today was a pair of slippers. Whoopee. Now that my laundry and scrapbooking area are in the unfinished part of the basement with a cold concrete floor, I really needed a pair of slippers. While I was looking, I found some Isotoner slippers that looked and felt oh-so-comfy. I was considering the bright red pair until I saw a Breast Cancer Awareness/Pink Ribbon Store display and saw these:I'm not big on pink, but I decided what the heck. It's for a good cause and who cares what color your slippers are anyway? As I was buying them, I remembered that Sweetnicks has been doing a nice job of displaying pink items you can buy to help fund Breast Cancer Awareness. Check out her site for more ideas for Pink Ribbon purchases in her "In the Pink" series, there's Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. The slippers above are available at department stores like Macy*s - I also found them on the Isotoner site.

That's it for tonight. Until tomorrow............