Tag Archives: Wheaties

Heat Your Home With Plastic Bags

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Many of the world’s great scientific discoveries came quite by accident. Remember “Come here Watson, I need you?” Then there’s the discovery of Wheaties. A cook at an institution was making gruel for breakfast when the porridge was spilled on a hot stove, making a crispy flake. The cook ate the flake and , viola, Wheaties was born.

In the same spirit of serendipitous invention I have discovered how to heat your home using plastic bags. Not just any plastic bag, but the kind you put broccoli into at the grocery store.

I was at work recently and accidentally let my plastic bag come in contact with the drywall. When I let go of it I noticed that it was sticking to the wall just like a booger.

In the photo above, the little speck on the right hand side is a booger, not a bug. Apparently, where I work no one does a “Booger Background Check” and they hire people who wipe boogers on walls. Come to think of it, they don’t even have a question on the job application that asks “Do you ever wipe boogers on your employers walls?”

But I digress.

Anyway, the bag stuck to the wall because of static electricity. The bag had rubbed on my fleece coat and decided to hang out with the paint  and gypsum on the drywall.

So I got to thinking, “What would happen if you took all of the plastic bags out of the recycle bin at the grocery store, rubbed them on your fleece coat, and stuck them to the walls of your house? You’d get more dead air space and as we all know, that translates into a warmer house.

By my estimates, 5000 plastic bags in an average bedroom would raise the temperature by 3.5 degrees Celsius.

You would need to acquire a lot of plastic bags, and go to the Thrift Shop Second Hand Store where you can buy old fleece coats that say “Aspen Police Department Ski Team” for a dollar.

Let me know if you are having trouble attaching the bags to the walls of your home. I can probably get that mystery employee to come over to your house and attach the bags using boogers.

How to Leverage Wheaties at the Grocery Store

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Leveraging Wheaties is a lost art form.

One evening Caleb and I stopped  by the store for a few groceries.  We noticed that there was a pallet of the new Wheaties “Fuel” cereal on sale, at a substantial discount. We grabbed two boxes, and a few other items and proceeded to the self checkout. When we scanned the boxes of Wheaties, an automatic coupon popped out. “$2.00 off on your next grocery store purchase” read the coupon.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty good.”

“You know if you hit the ‘BACKSPACE’ button on the screen now, you could use that coupon, Caleb said.”

“That can’t be right,” I replied. “You could forget these other groceries, and buy a $4.27 box of Wheaties for only 87 cents.”

“Correct,” said Caleb.

We stared at each other for a moment. Then we tested the system. Sure enough, Caleb could buy one box of Wheaties, use the store discount, manufacturer’s coupon, plus the auto coupon, and buy a box of Wheaties Fuel for only 87 cents. The catch? You had to buy exactly 5 boxes at a time.

Being 8:30 at night, not having anything else to do, and having a pocket full of cash, we began a very strange process: Caleb brought 5 boxes of Wheaties to the self checkout, performed the weird purchase, and I took the cart out to the Subaru, and loaded it up. I was running carts as fast as I could.

As first, we tried to be discreet. But cashiers being who they are, they noticed me on about the 3rd or 4th trip I took out the door. After answering their question about the quantity of purchases with “We really like Wheaties,” we decided to go into overdrive and pretty much clear out the store as fast as possible.

Caleb was loading up carts as fast as he could, and I was running them out the door.

Did I mention that blueberries were on sale at a substantial discount, too? We pretty much cleaned out the blueberry section. I believe I commented to the store clerk how much we like blueberries on our Wheaties Fuel.

Then the store Manager showed up.

Caleb heard the clerk ask a distressed looking manager, “Can they do this?” The store manager wasn’t exactly sure at that moment. Meanwhile Caleb  smiled at him while I ran Wheaties out the front door like a squirrel tearing across the lawn with a wad of nuts in my mouth.

When it was over, we had collected 100 boxes of Wheaties. And cases of blueberries.

We set the Wheaties up like dominos at home and played with them. The blueberries ended up on cereal, and a thousand smoothies.

Next time we might try Snickers bars…