How To Spend $280 at Costco without Even Trying

I am my father's daughter. To try to induce me to come visit him from college, he would always call on Saturday afternoons: "Emily, if you come home now, you can come to Costco with me." This was actually more tempting than it sounds as my father's usual penny-saved-penny-earned mentality flies out the window as he walks in the warehouse door. Printers! Office Supplies! Clothes! DVDs! Books! Garden Implements! Baked Goods (never mind that there were only two people at home to eat twelve jumbo muffins)! Fruit! Jalepeno Poppers! Snacks! A kid in the candy store, my dad.

Last night I went to Costco to purchase some more Jackson Perkins roses (Sixteen Candles and Queen Elizabeth) and Adobe Photoshop Elements. That equals $100 worth of goods, for which I paid $280. As a bonus I got

• Forty-eight string cheeses (to be fair, I eat at least one a day)
• Six peppers: two red, two yellow, and two orange (these always look so good but at least some always go bad)
• Six bags of pasta (that serve eight people per bag)
• Two packages of spinach cheese ravioli
• A jumbo carton of peeled garlic
• Two containers of Cetaphil facial cleanser (even though I still have half a container)
• Jalepeno stuffed olives (a sucker for gourmet olives, this one)
• Two pounds of spinach (better get cooking or this will end up in my next almost-rotton-vegetable primavera)
• Six rawhide bones (untested--and turns out Huck only likes them so-so)
• Forty-four uncooked tortillas (I froze half immediately)
• A large carton of feta crumbles (I need a half cup for this recipe I've been meaning to make. There are at least three cups in this carton)
• A large wedge of amazing blue cheese
• Dried basil (A steal: only $2.88. You can't expect me to pass that up)
• Eight cans of organic canned tomatoes (which I could have purchased for a dollar less with basil added had i forgone the organic. am sucker)
• Forty-eight cans of Friskies cat food (need my year's supply)
• Dried cherries (for my cereal, but I currently don't have any milk)
• Salsa (but no chips, and I don't have any at home)
• Twenty-four diet dr. peppers
• A large carton of grape tomatoes
• Some rice stuffed in grape leaves
• A multi-grain baguette (of which I ate a hunk on the way home)
• Some lovely sushi for dinner
• An InStyle magazine (I subscribe to the Economist, the Atlantic, Harper's, and the New Yorker, but considering the frequency with which I purchase InStyle, I should really subscribe to that too.)