Ode to Costco

I adore Costco. It was an excellent investment buying a membership this year. It's not only provided me with large quantities of toiletries and Parmesan cheese.

First off, Scott's been benefiting greatly from having Costco so close. He can bike there or use his CTA pass, so he's taken to going every week. By going so often, he can pick up a bag of lettuce each week and thus has a ready-made dinner every night. And a pretty healthy one, at that. Plus he can grab a quick dinner there on nights he shops since they sell a Vienna Beef Polish sausage with sauerkraut and a refillable drink for only $1.50. Plus they sell big, yummy soft pretzels covered in Parmesan cheese on the cheap, too.

But I feel so partial to the place today because I found a terrific new pair of jeans there for only $16.99! I've been looking for jeans for a while now and haven't been able to find a decent pair for less than $30. I'm a bit picky, I guess, but I wanted a pair that wouldn't be too tight but that wouldn't swallow me in the way my current jeans do. But just like Costco sells name-brand food, appliances and toiletries, it also sells well-known jean brands. I ended up passing over the Calvin Kleins, Ralph Laurens and Gloria Vanderbilts and going for a pair of boot-cut Levi's. Original price? $40. Nice!

I also picked up a lunch from the deli case, a huge turkey croissant sandwich and Caesar salad combo for $5.29. It was actually enough for two lunches, so I only took the salad to work today. An excellent deal as well, and that's not even throwing in all the free food samples I got on the way back to the deli case (the Tony Roma's barbecue sauce was yummy).

I grabbed . . . well, I guess it was breakfast from the Costco cafeteria/picnic area outside. They have the Polish sausage combo out here in California, too, although they offer no sauerkraut (big loss - yeah, right) and they're Hebrew National instead of Vienna Beef (which is a Chicago specialty). At any rate, it hit the spot after having fasted since my cinnamon bun at around 7:30 the night before.

The fasting was for the blood tests I had this morning. No results yet, but anyone want to take a guess at which of the battery of tests planned might come back with something off?

1. Blood sugar
2. Thyroid
3. One of the ones I didn't recognize
4. Not a blood thing but something else
5. Nothing wrong so Colleen is a nutcase

You can vote in the comments if you'd like.