To my Concerned Readers: I do have cloth bags.

Since a lot of you were alarmed at the number of plastic bags in my grocery picture yesterday, I just want all of you to know that I do indeed have re-usable bags. In fact, I have a great many, and when I am home, I faithfully take them to the grocery store. I can’t actually remember the last time I used a plastic bag at a grocery store and I am totally sold on using them. It’s not terribly hard, and as long as I remember to put the bags right back in my van after shopping, I don’t have trouble remembering to use them.

However, I don’t think I have enough bags to hold the volume of groceries we bought yesterday, and I didn’t bring all of them anyways (some are being used to hold things like shoes and clothes right now).

Yesterday was just not a typical shopping day for me. I hardly ever plop down $165 for a week of groceries, but I did yesterday, I hardly EVER darken the doors of a WalMart, but I did yesterday, and I hardly ever use plastic grocery bags, but I did yesterday.

Although I’m not entirely abandoning my frugal and green lifestyle, I am living a little differently on vacation. For example, I don’t have a compost bin, so my produce scraps are going down the garbage disposal. There’s no clotheslines or drying rack, so most of my laundry is going into the dryer. I bought frozen pizza instead of making it myself, I bought ready-made yogurt, and I even bought several loaves of bread. The recycling options here are limited (newspaper and metal are about it), so we’re definitely producing more trash than usual.

But, this is two weeks out of the year. The other 50 weeks, I’ll cook from scratch, line-dry my clothes, make yogurt, bake bread, recycle and compost like crazy, bring cloth bags when I go shopping, and avoid Walmart. I promise. 😉

So, no worries. Except for once a year, I’m a die-hard cloth bagger. 🙂

P.S. I will take the bags back to Walmart to recycle them.