I just used “BFF” totally non-ironically.

You know that I am cheap.

You know that I am cheap, don’t like spending money, can’t stand spending lots for something that I could get for less, etc etc (thus 3/4 of my wardrobe including my wedding dress although that’s not something I wear around town or anything is from eBay). Therefore it must be no surprise that I just bought twenty things! For twenty dollars! At Dollarama!

It’s in my veins, you see. My father was raised in a home where he had six siblings. Three bedrooms (including my grandparents’) in the house. They ate in shifts. My grandmother and grandfather had all these kids to raise on a coal miner’s pay, and they could stretch things a very, very long way. Plus, the whole Irish/Scottish thing, so you KNOW there’s some… uh… thriftiness in there. Even up until her last weeks of life, my grandma was scouring the sales bins. She had a whole room in the house dedicated to future gifts. Like, she’d find things that were normally $50 on sale for $10. She knew that such-and-such’s birthday was only 11 months away. She’d buy the item, and put it in the room. She had a gift for any occasion in there, and I doubt she paid over $20 for anything.
Then there’s my mother’s side– she, also, had six brothers and sisters. My grandfather was a farmer/lumberjack/builder. They raised their own food, made their own clothes, built their own house (and I don’t mean “hired a contractor to build the house”. I mean “cut down the trees, dug the foundation, sewed the curtains, made the furniture” built their own house). At any given time they had up to 20 people living with them because my grandparents would take in anyone who needed to be taken in, even though they weren’t exactly rich themselves. They got by, though, because they knew how.
I’m in no way comparing myself to them — no way, because I haven’t in any way had to go through the hard times that they have. But I can see it a little bit in myself, sometimes, when I go for the no-name brand spaghetti sauce instead of Prego or something.

So, back to today. Went to the Dollarama. Bought all the hardware needed for my garden. For $20 (actually I also bought a makeup bag and some sidewalk chalk for my nephews). Then spent another $30 on seeds for my garden, at the garden centre. Because the dollarama only had flower seeds. But that’s okay.