Boviosity!

I'm officially not that guy any more.

You know the one. I think The Onion even featured a story about him once. The Dad who stubbornly insists on saving money by buying store brands, which are either "just as good" (a demonstrable falsehood in many, many cases) or are "good enough" (demonstrably true in nearly all cases.)

I'm tired of playing that role, the victimizer who deprives my family of what they *really* want, which is Coca-Cola, NOT K-Cola or whatever the Kroger brand of flavored carbonated sugar water is. Maybe it's a little codependent or otherwise sick, but I don't bring stuff home to my family in order to have their shining faces droop in disappointment.

The flip side of that role is the guy who has to smirk when his wife does the shopping, holding up a jar of Smucker's Grape Preserves and saying, "Only the best, eh?" I'm also not that guy any more, thank God. (I've given up saying, "You know, for the purposes of making peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, the kids really don't care if it's this or the store brand which is $.50 less." The massive eye-rolling this engenders is just not worth it.)

I'll pay the extra $.10-$.50 per item and ignore the fact that at 100 items in a cart that comes to around an extra $10 per cart. Lord knows, they're ignoring that fact. I've tried for 15 years to drive this point home. I give up.

So when I went shopping for hot dogs on Saturday, I brought home Ball Park dogs and Sarah Lee buns. NOTHING but the best, that's my motto.

They were yummy.

Oh, and would you believe it - I actually received a complaint of the extravagance of the Sarah Lee buns.