Cause I Got Class: Bring Your Own Bag (Lady) December 12, 2007

Part I
So I’m one of those crunchy people who thinks about things like reducing their carbon footprint (I know, I know, I can hear you groaning now). I don’t buy bottle water, I wash my clothes in cold water, I ride my bike or walk whenever I can, I recycle everything…and yes, I bring my own bags to the grocery store. And why not? Who wants all those paper and/or plastic bags from the store cluttering up their house? And, honestly, it’s not hard to grab five or six cloth bags (I have a collection which includes a MOM’s organics bag, a Whole Foods bag, an AFT bag, a bag from an Indian grocer) before heading out to do the shopping. This also satisfies the spendthrift in me because many of the stores I go to offer a 10-CENT! discount for each bag I DON’T use (look, you already knew I was a cheap-ass). Plus—and most importantly–I get to feel superior to all the people who DON’T bring their own bags.

 
Part II
It’s winter now and I find it impossible to get all of my gym clothes into my gym bag, especially if I’m going swimming. What with the suit and cap and goggles and flip-flops and towel and all… And the winter shirts and sweaters and socks and boots… Well, you get the idea. So, what I do is, I wear my workout wear to the gym, carry my swim stuff in my gym bag, and carry my clean clothes in another bag (I’m currently using the cloth AFT tote bag The Husband brought home from work). When I’m done working out, the wet suit and towel and other swim stuff goes back into my regular gym bag, and the dirty workout clothes go into the AFT bag. When I get home, I unload everything into the dirty clothes or hang it to dry or put it wherever it needs to go.

 
Part III
So I was at Trader Joe’s the other day with my mishmash of cloth bags stuffed into the underside of a cart I’d piled high with groceries. The cashier rang up my tasty food items and her assistant slid them into my bags. All was well with the world: we had food for another week, and I was feeling good about doing my part to save the planet. What made me feel EVEN BETTER was that while unpacking the groceries, down at the bottom of the AFT bag, there amongst the soymilk and boxes of 10 grain crackers and organic what-have-you, I found my stinky sweaty sports bra.

Cause I got Class: Free Sample Lunch December 7, 2007

 
 

Saturday is Free Sample day at the Whole Foods. I swear I found this out by accident. I had taken The Boy and The Sister to a huge 450 person rummage sale at a church in Bethesda Saturday morning, and after a couple hours of shoving our way through snarls of other surly bargain hunters (read: cheap-asses like ourselves) and haggling over the price of a Slinky and a pair of Scooby Doo slippers, we’d worked up a powerful hunger and decided to get lunch. Of course the parking lot at the Whole Foods should have told us something: there were three REAL policemen directing traffic through the lot.
 

Inside we found the store even more crowded than the church had been and—much like the traffic here in DC—jammed up and barely moving because the sample stations that were set up at the end of nearly every aisle had attracted crowds of hungry losers hoping to get a free lunch.

 
So, there we were, standing in line after line for our tastes of meatballs, chicken nuggets, dumplings, ham, some crazy gourmet crackers with a blue-cheese cranberry and nut spread, vanilla cheesecake, chocolate layer cake, peppermint chocolate bark, and hot apple cider. By the time we had made our way around the Whole Store we were full! What better lunch to have after a day trying to save a buck buying used crap than Free Samples? It put me in mind of all those times my Aunt J., the woman who taught me the power and importance of rummage saling, took us to the Farmer Jack’s (a grocery store chain) for Free Sample Lunch. I know it sounds White Trash (and it is!), but we had a blast, giggling as we went back to the foods we liked over and over again.
 

Of course the irony of acting so White Trash at Whole Foods—where we can’t actually afford most of the foods we were sampling–only made things all the more delicious.