My grandmother, bless her soul, hated the C-word. Coupon.

Nothing annoyed her so much as some poor soul digging through their coupons, holding up the checkout line at the grocery store, all in a futile attempt to save a measly 50 cents on yogurt and canned peas.

Boy, if she could only see me now, rustling through the Sunday paper for the ads and coupon inserts on my lunch break.

In fact, it has gotten so bad, I’m almost ready to start lugging around one of those bulky coupon organizers like the kind my mom has.

It all began innocently enough, when I started clipping out diaper coupons for a co-worker with two kids under two.

I probably got the hang of it too fast; pretty soon I was doling out more Huggies money-savers than she could keep up with.

It wasn’t long before I was clipping for myself, once I’d noticed the sheer variety of food items I could save on with just a little piece of paper.

Coupons may not save me a lot of dough, but what I do save puts this big goofy grin on my face, like I’ve won the lottery or a trip to Mars.

I guess this is just one of the side effects of being a cheapskate.

Every coupon fanatic has their own strategy, though, depending on what their preferences are. On any given day, I can be spied haunting the food aisles at Target with a wad of coupons in one hand, hoping against hope that at least of few of them will match up with Target’s food selection.

There are usually no more than a few winners, and sometimes I’ll even end up tossing a coupon or two if the savings just aren’t worth it.

I’m not going to buy two cans of Pringles at $2.50 a pop, just to get a dollar off. I’d still be out $4.

Once in a while, however, I’ll make a total killing, like the Suave coupon for 75 cents off. Because Suave is only 94 cents at Target, I only paid a whopping 19 cents for a stick of deodorant!

Duplicate coupons occur quite frequently in the Sunday paper, and this is how habits develop, on anything from food to cosmetics.

For instance, after dissecting the inserts like an animal cadaver in a high school biology lab, I came up with a grand total of five Super Pretzel coupons, which promptly led to a soft pretzel addiction.

But these trends never last. After about a month or so, a new flock of brands will take over my favorite section of Sunday’s Bee (with the exception of the ever-resilient Huggies), and as a result, new addictions form. (This is partly responsible for why I’ve been buying up all of the lip gloss at Longs.)

I don’t know, maybe it is time for me to get a coupon holder of some kind, because I’m starting to find their soggy remains in the wash along with my jeans and wayward pennies.

And I guess when it comes to my grandmother’s views on coupons, it pays to be prepared when you get to the checkout line.