Leadership and Self-Deception

Finally I am posting the book for this month. The name of the book is Leadership and Self-Deception and it is by the Arbinger Institute.

Hope you are all doing great and enjoying the lovely, cold, fall weather. I am sure enjoying wearing jackets and eating soup. See you all soon!

more coupons

Rule #1: I will not spend more than 2 hours a month couponing. 

Rule #2: I will not buy things that I don't normally buy because it's a good deal.  Unless it's free.

Rule #3: I will not go to more than one store. (Walmart cause they price match. Okay occasionally I still hit Costco cause I love it!)

Rule #4: I will not shower more than once a day. Wait, that doesn't apply here...but I won't. 

Okay, so I switched to savvyshopper.com on Emily's suggestion.  It is much better.  At least for the way I shop. I was using grocery smarts.com but I do all my shopping at Walmart and just price match. So it was kind of a pain to go through and see all the specials from the individual grocery stores. Now I just look for the best (Wow) deals on savvy shopper and I'm done with my list. I do get a Sunday newspaper and my mom saves me her coupons from her paper but I find I only save about $5 a week on coupons. I pay $8 a month for the paper so it's worth it...maybe. I just don't buy a lot of coupon-ed items. However, I buy tons and tons and tons of produce so I really like seeing what the other stores have for good buys in that department and then price match at Walmart. Really, the AF Walmart has pretty good produce, I think. I probably save about $10 a week in price matching so I'm saving $60 a month (-$8 for the paper) on doing the coupon thing. I spend about $400 a month on groceries (this includes diapers and formula etc. so I am not saving 50% but I shop at Walmart for all my non-couponed items too so their prices are already way lower than Smiths or Albertsons. I'm not as good as Emily at it but this works for me.  Emily, you are an inspiration!

Nik

I was just looking through our list of books on the right and I KNOW we're missing some (like the one we (or at least you all) read in August). If you see one is missing, please post it for us all! :)

Oh, and Jenn, would you mind posting the name and author of our book for this month?

Coupons, coupons...

Ok girls, here are the sites I use to set up my store deals with coupons.

savvyshopper.com Here I signed up to get a weekly email and these are local stores. You can also just go to the shopping wizard and search by store. This site will often give web addresses to other coupon sites such as coupons.com, cellfire.com and shortcuts.com. The last two are sites for Smiths where you enter your fresh value card # and select your coupons and they go right on your card, so when you check out, the discount is applied. There are also product sites (like scrubbing bubbles or whatever) which give coupons for just their product. On these sites where you have to enter your email address, I use an alternate one because I think they probably send lots of junk mail.

I also use savingwithshellie.com. On this blog stores are listed on the right side of the page. This is where I get my Walgreens deals and I normally search Target and Walmart as well. This girl is in Texas, so sometimes the prices are a little different than what she has posted.

Once you start getting the Sunday paper, it takes a few weeks of clipping coupons before you can get all the deals from these sites. I organize my coupons in categories like Drinks, Meat, Condiments, Dairy, Cleaning & Laundry, Baby Items, Personal Items (shampoo, make up, deodarant, etc.) Then I put the ones that are going to expire first in front. Once I plan my shopping list, I pull out all the coupons I am planning on using so I don't forget any and the checkout is smoother. If I'm at the store and I see a product marked down, I go through my coupons and try to match them up (I can especially do this at Smiths with the Managers Markdown, I've gotten many free yogurts!)

I hope this is helpful to you guys. It does take some time, and some practice, but I have definitely seen it's payoffs, and I love feeling like I got a great deal. Nikki, If you could post (or comment) the coupons sites you go to, that would be great!


Emily

So, my worst fear of having the responsibility of choosing the book club book has come true - that I pick a book of fiction based on the little bit I know of it, and it turns out to be totally inappropriate. Arg. I didn't realize how many of the stories are about sex and death. Anyway, I hope you have all procrastinated reading it until this week. I'm still not done, but here is my updated list of stories to avoid:
Happy Endings
The Boy
Iguana Hunting
Disappearing
A Lover's Ear
The Verb To Kill
Bigfoot Stole My Wife
I am only up to "Family Album" now, but I'll post any others that I come to.
Next time I think I'll stick with non-fiction :)

OK, I apologize, but I feel the need to warn you on a couple of stories in this book, since I was the one who chose it. I only read a few of them in school, and now I've found a couple that you probably will want to skip. So, I hope actually that none of you has started reading yet!
One to absolutely avoid is "The Boy" by Joyce Carol Oates, and another red flag would be a pretty bad word on the second page of Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings." I'll keep you posted on any others I come across that need censoring. But the nice thing about short stories is that you can skip a bad one all together and not miss out on any part critical to the rest of the book.

Thanks everyone who came last night - it was so fun to have an excuse to hang out outside and woman-talk :) So... here is our next book - an anthology of short-short stories called Sudden Fiction International. All the stories have fewer than 2000 words. I was thinking that when we meet next at Caroline's (I think we decided on August 28th) that we could all have our favorite 2 stories picked out to discuss. Here is a link to the book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0393306135/ref=sr_1_olp_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248458107&sr=1-1