Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year when I end up in a minor meltdown over money. The time of year when I come out of a delusional fog and realize that we spend like kings and earn like beggars. The time of year when I give the Make Some Changes speech to my better half and anyone else who will listen.

And there have been some changes made, certainly. One of them has been an ongoing re-education about grocery shopping.

I'm not going to tell you to plan for a week's worth of food and prepare a bunch and freeze it and all kinds of proactive stuff that you don't have time to do. While it's a great idea and it's starting to work in my house, it's still daunting and I'm not here to watch you set yourself up to fail.

My mother used to carry a calculator to the grocery store,and add up her bill as she went along. I thought it was so dumb, so embarrassing. But for the past two weeks, I've turned to the add-'em-up method of grocery shopping, out of desperation. And whaddaya know, she was onto something.

Watching the total in your cart inch higher and higher definitely makes one more aware of what one is purchasing, and helps separate needs from wants in a jiffy. You'll think twice about the six dollar salad dressing and the double-priced pre-sliced cheese. You'll be wise to the grocery store tricksters who put the expensive stuff at eye level and scoot the reasonable(and usually better for you) products to the top or bottom shelves. You'll have a better sense of where your cash is going, rather than doing what we used to do, which is unload all of your shit onto the conveyor and make a friendly wager on the total. And know that you were pulling your best guess directly outof your ass.

Now, ideally, someone would invent a little scanner that would attach to the grocery cart, and you'd be able to blip everything in as you went along, and keep a running total. But we know the grocery will never agree to this, because they wouldn't stand a chance of selling nine dollar frozen pizzas and gourmet chips and pricey bottled pomegranate products.

What have I learned from this little exercise? It's not too difficult to slice your own cheese instead of paying the cheese people to cut it down to the exact size of a Triscuit. The price of breakfast cereal is highway robbery. And dogs and babies are hella expensive.

This concludes our Money Tip. Pack up your calculators and race against your own total as other shoppers stare at you and huff as they maneuver their carts around your stationary ass while you add the price of frozen vegetables to the price of beer. You'll learn something.