Did she or didn't she...?

Yesterday I went on my first full-on, gotta-have-a-list shopping trip since Toni died. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be. Maybe because over the last few months I’ve been making them alone anyway. Toni never liked shopping anyway (unless it was for jewels or antiques) and with her health getting worse, she REALLY didn’t feel like going. A curious thing happened at the checkout.

For months now, we’d been getting rebate slips from the Humane Society when we bought the heartworm preventative. I had collected 5 of them worth $12 each. I finally sent them in and got 5 pre-payed Visa cards in the mail. Of course there were all kinds of limitations on how you could use them and I’ve been wanting to get rid of them for quite some time now. So I determined yesterday was the day. I needed to buy more than $60 worth of stuff to make this work: you had to use the cards AFTER you use your regular payment method. So you buy $61 dollars of groceries, pay a buck in cash and then knock off $12 per card until it’s all paid. You with me? Why not buy $59 of stuff? Well after a time you start getting fees on whatever balance left on any of the cards. 3 cents left after 3 months, that’s a fee of X dollars. Monthly. I don’t think so. At any rate I wanted my free money and the time had come. But it meant I would have to do some quick math at the checkout. Subtract 60 from the total, pay that first and then make the cards do their work. Not really in the mood to that kind of math at Walmart.

I had loaded all of the empties (mostly Toni’s Diet Cokes, but my Vernor’s was well represented) into the back of the car a while ago. It ended up being a total of $10.90. Not bad. Remember that number. I finished shopping and headed up to the front of the store to begin the long and complicated payment process. The bill came to $130.90 including tax. Then came the miracle. Adding the $10.90 credit for bottles and cans that brought the total down to exactly $120. Jackpot! $60 on my debit card and $60 on the prepaids. It couldn’t be any easier. Holy Cow!

Now you may not believe in this sorta stuff, but Toni kinda did. And I’m beginning to wonder. Sure you could say it was just coincidence. But what are the odds that the bottle refund (of mostly Toni’s pop) would round off the figure to make it soooo easy to figure out my payment with the cards I wanted to use? $10.90 is such a random number and the total just happened to work out to a nice round even number? Hmmm. So either God was giving me a break because of…you know…or Toni was on the lookout. Either way. I was my happiest Walmart shopping trip ever. Although, when you think about Walmart, that really isn’t saying much, huh?

Peace to you my friends.