The Sky's the Limit

Our record with Costco goes back a long way, yet we hardly ever go there. An annual membership fee entitles you to a card with your picture on it and entry into a warehouse filled with a mind boggling variety of stuff in wholesale quantities. Many, many years ago, it was called Price Club and was in a massive warehouse somewhere in Albany or El Cerrito...one of the next towns over from Berkeley. We used to go there and come home with things like a 50 pound bag of pistachio nuts, which I don't like and OilMan would eat until he was ill, or two hundred AA batteries which would die quietly in a drawer before they ever saw the light of day, or even the inside of a flashlight. Impulse buys are one thing in an ordinary grocery store. They are a completely different thing when they come in vast amounts. Besides we didn't really have a place to store a 25 pound can of kidney beans and 56 frozen burritos. So we quit. 

When we moved to Santa Rosa everybody we knew belonged to Costco. They got great stuff there. For practically nothing. I went with my friend Cindy a few times and instead of running for the door when it was crowded, we plunged in and had fun...I bought a really nice down jacket for $15. We loaded up both our fridges with Costco food...fresh fruit and veggies, whole salmons, wonderful rotisserie chickens and all sorts of unlikely things with the Kirkland label...gigantic bags of popcorn, huge vessels of olive oil, massive packages of "Golden Spurtle" oatmeal, Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc. The last time I went with Cindy was the day before the fire. Our power was out for a week and we were evacuated for another, and everything in the fridge was ruined.

Everything changed this Christmas. Jim, who enjoys buying quirky gifts gave OilMan a box with an enormous container of peanut butter pretzels, a huge box of Ritz crackers,  a giant box of 24 individual packets of Goldfish crackers and some bottles of Kim Crawford wine. In the bottom of the box was a gift card for a paid up Costco membership.

We went this morning at 9am. The only people in the store were the ladies setting up their sample stands for bites of everything from Mexican raviolis to Samosas with barbacoa sauce, the butchers laying out their sides of beef and 24 packs of pork chops and the couple with a strange object in their cart, which turned out to be a two story carpet covered cat scratching toy.

We wandered around aisles stacked floor to ceiling with everything from wheels of cheese to washers and dryers, bought some things for dinner...and a fire extinguisher, and have been reorganizing the kitchen, the pantry and the garage ever since. Now we have room to store the massive bag of granola and the 36 pack of taquitos. 

I think the fire extinguisher is still in the back of my car....