My disease (unedited)

Heredity is tough to beat.

I have inherited characteristics of both of my parents, and I’d like to think the fact I’m not the least bit bald is because my grandfather had a decent head of hair into his 70s. (Baldness skips a generation and is influenced by your mother’s side of the family, allegedly. True or not, I’ll buy into it.)

I inherited one of my mother’s traits that I cannot shake, and I doubt I ever will.

I love coupons.

It pains me to shop without them, and while I’m not obsessed with using them, it warms my heart when I do.

I collect coupons for restaurants near the office and periodically patronize those places. My co-workers, who must make a lot more money than me, act as if going to the same place twice in two weeks is some sort of dining faux pas. Rush never tires of making some lame coupon quip whenever we talk about going somewhere to eat, but I never here him complain when I split the cost of a meal with him using a coupon and it costs him less than $5 for lunch.

While I don’t buy five copies of the Sunday paper each week, I will clip coupons from it each week. I also pull off several of the in-store adhesive coupons that are directly on packages if I’ll use them down the road. Tonight at Target there were “save $1.50 now” coupons on 12-packs of Sierra Mist and Sierra Mist Free. I don’t buy Sierra Mist Free very often, I need my Diet Pepsi fix most of the time, but I grabbed six coupons off of the packages for future use.

So why was I shopping at Target? I don’t buy a lot of groceries there, even though research shows Super Target stores are as competitive as the local grocery chains. The biggest reason I shop at Target: printable coupons.

Target has printable coupons on its website, evidently, and while there aren’t tons of them offering huge savings, there are a few gems. I buy small bottles of mustard for 9 cents, (many of which are donated to the local food shelf, occasional meat and cheese products for a great price if they’re on sale and Pepsi products for less than $2 a 12-pack, typically, when I use the $1 off a 12-pack coupon for each one.

Printing the coupons is easy, because people transfer the coupon image to their own websites and create coupon generators, a template that prints out any denomination of desired coupons quickly and easily.

I learn about some of these great deals through websites such as fatwallet.com, online forums where people discuss online and retail deals around the country. Many of those folks are hardcore. I look like an amateur in comparison to the hoops some folks jump through to get things for free, or even make a profit after a rebate. I haven’t graduated to that level, and I don’t think I ever will.

If only there were coupons for beer.

Speed round:

• My weekend bike ride in northern Minnesota was canceled, which is unfortunate, as Saturday would have been a great day to bike 100 miles.

• I love the book I’m reading, “Breaking Vegas.”

• I watched one movie the entire summer, “Super Bad.”

• Future blog topic: the women I love.

• Two years ago I went to a Halloween party. My costume was a hybrid of Gene and Richard Simmons. There’s a picture somewhere. Since I'm not smart enough to figure out how to post it here, (I don't think my ancient computer will let me,) all I can do is post a link. Look here, Chachi!