One of my goals this year is to increase things I do for charity. One of the things I decided to do was send my expired coupons to the military families overseas.

I get 3 coupon inserts each week. I buy 2 Denver Post subscriptions and my parents give me the coupons from the local paper that they don't want, usually all of them. I cut out the coupons I think I will use, if there is a good sale. Usually only a dozen or so a week. I file these in a plastic check file folder that I carry with me to the store.

The rest of the inserts I save in a file folder with the date on the front. Then if I read about a good sale on something I could get for the food pantry or a money maker, I go to the file and clip the coupons I need that week.

So each month I go through the coupons in my plastic check file and get rid of the expired ones. Then I have about 10 weeks of inserts filed by date in a drawer. Each week I take the oldest file and take out the coupon inserts and put the new inserts in the file. I cross out the date on the front and put the new date on and the file goes to the top of the pile.

I used to just throw the old inserts away, but now I am clipping every coupon in the old file to send to the military. It takes quite a bit of time, even combining inserts so I cut 2 - 3 at a time. Then the coupons have to be sorted by food and non-food and placed in a baggie to keep them seperate. I've been clipping them while eating breakfast.

I sent my first batch off to a place in the U.S. that will then send them overseas, so I didn't have to deal with filling out custom forms, etc. The coupons were about 4" thick, it weighed 11.7 oz and cost $3.09 to mail.

My mom sent me an email with my birth stats yesterday. I was born at 5:07 am, weighed 7# 2oz, was 20 inches long. I was a 10 month old baby so I was born with a 3" ponytail hanging down my back, you can see it in a lot of my baby pictures.

I finished reading the library book Out of the Dark by David Weber. Sci/Fi - very good.