Perhaps it is indicative of the rising price of groceries or of my pathetic little life but most certainly one of the highlights of said life was winning the supermarket sweeps from Ukrops and First Market Bank this year.  I mean what mother wouldn’t dream of one hundred and twenty unfettered seconds with me and an empty cart and ten aisles full of food.  Well unfettered except for the giant balloons attached to my cart and the restrictions on the meat and frozen food aisles.  Free food and the chance to give the charity of my choice a check for one thousand dollars was too good to be true; especially because I chose a program called Success by Six at United Way which just happens to be run by my friend Morgan.  It was to her that I would be handing a two foot by four-foot giant check.  All I could ask myself at the end of the day was, ”Why oh why didn’t I get this down on video?”

Let’s just say that the first thing I encountered on my frenzied run down the aisles was Paul Newman salad dressing and Paul Newman salad dressing hit the floor till I was running like Road Runner in a slick of oil moving no where.  Knowing I was wasting valuable seconds I decided skating was my next best option.  Not as efficient as running and definitely not as pretty for a tomboy like me but better then pulling a Road Runner at my sweep.

From the salad dressing I went onto peanut butter, coffee, tuna, in that order.  For the coup de grace it was a forty-dollar canister of the finest virgin olive oil available.  With twenty seconds left I was just frantically grasping at items, far from an effective method considering that no family with young children really wants four boxes of Fruit Loop Cereal Straws.  Fruit Loop Cereal Straws being sugar straws used to slurp up the pink and purple after effects of tie-dyed cereal on milk.

I couldn’t stop smiling as I bellied up to the conveyor belt with my overflowing basket.  I was in their words, the all-time winner with almost four hundred dollars worth of free food.  Six months down the road, we are still eating two packets of Albacore tuna every Sunday night; proof that there is meat housed in other regions then the meat aisle and proof that I did indeed do my research before said spree as any good shopper and thrifty mom would. All in a days work.  All in a days work.