"Life is one BIG adventure"

My mother has always been frugal, a true penny saver, but this Thanksgiving weekend, things have come to a new low.

Rite Aid, a well known drug store chain, is offering a twenty or thirty dollar gift card if you spend $100 dollars by the end of December. My Mother is a frequent shopper at Right Aid, but by shopping the ads and using massive amounts of coupons, she rarely spends more than five dollars per visit. Fearing she would not make the hundred dollars in a month, my Mother has stepped down to an ultimate low of searching the Rite Aid parking lots for other peoples receipts that she can enter into the computer and claim as her expenditures.

Her initial searches in her home state of Virginia were not as successful as she expected, so she decided to try her luck at the New Jersey Rite Aids. So today, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, my Grandmother, Mother, and I went out shopping in search of shoes for me. My Mother pulls into a Rite Aid parking lot and gets out of the car to search the ground for litter. Now, 90% of my family is from New Jersey, but we have all appropriately nicknamed it "the armpit of America." I wasn't sure what my Mother was doing, but I feared she might catch a disease from the massive amount of litter strewn on the ground.

When my Mother returned to the car, I demanded and explanation. She gave it to me, and all I could do is shake my head. My Mother has reached a new low. My Grandmother thought the whole excursion was hilarious, and she even got out of the car to look through the piles of white on the ground which most of the time turned out to be tissues or toilet paper.

I refused to participate in this multi-generation activity and sat in the back watching out the window at the onlookers who starred at us as we circled the parking lot, jumping out to grab any piece of paper we found.

After the laughter subsided after that awful, but typical, excerision, my Grandmother summed it up, "Life is one BIG adventure."