Bag Lady, you gon' hurt yo' back!

I have a bad habit of accumulating plastic shopping bags. When I come home from the grocery store, I put my food away and end up with a huge pile of bags. Growing up we always reused them as liners for the small garbage cans in our house, so I never throw them away. However, my husband and I don't use them for trash that often. We use them sometimes to clean out the litter box, but usually when we take out the trash we dump everything into one large bag. That includes the contents of the few small trash cans we have in our house. We really don't even use those shopping bags as trash can liners, so I'm keeping all these old bags for nothing. And I don't care what kind of fancy plastic bag storage system you buy. They NEVER look neat when you put them away.

I've issued myself a challenge: no plastic shopping bags for the rest of the year.

Besides the fact that they are terrible for the environment, they are cluttering my house! So I decided simply to not use them anymore under any circumstances. Thankfully, most stores now offer reusable bags for shopping. I like to think it's because we're becoming more concerned about the planet, but truthfully the stores can save money if they encourage shoppers to reuse bags. They don't have to pay for as many plastic ones.

But now I have another problem. I'm scatterbrained and very forgetful these days and I never remember to bring my reusable bags! What do I end up doing? I end up buying more reusable bags while I'm at the store. I even tried keeping a stash of them in my trunk, just in case I decide to make a last-minute stop at Target or something (I'm an addict!). But what happens is I'll use the bags in my trunk, take my loot home, and forget to put the bags back in my car. Inevitably, when I get my next Target jones -- because I so often do -- I have no reusable bags with which to shop. And I end up buying more. Even worse, sometimes I forget they're in the car altogether (like today) and I buy new bags when there are perfectly good ones already in my trunk.

So the mountain of plastic bags is quickly turning into a mountain of reusable ones. Saving the planet as always, yet failing to save space. One of these days I'll get it together.

ETA: And it just dawned on me that even though I took the time to spread out all my bags, take a picture of them, upload them to Blogger, and type out this whole entry, I STILL didn't bother putting them in my trunk once I was finished! What is wrong with your girl?