Shopping

Acting on the blogvice (which is just regular advice, conveyed through a blog) of my college friend Lindsay, I decided to try out a new tactic with my grocery shopping. Generally, I shop on Friday evenings after I get paid, and I delight in wandering literally every single aisle of the grocery store, looking at this, poking that, sniffing the cheeses and inspecting the produce. I chat with the people in the bakery. I consider a new and exotic variety of dry goods and, when I see that it is good, I buy it.

But, I tend to spend about $50/week on groceries, and I just feel like that's silly for only two people. So, last week I sat down with a notebook and planned out every dinner we'll eat for the next five weeks. Yep, that's right. Every one. We tend to eat no more than toast or a banana for breakfast, and we both eat lunch at work, so dinner is the main meal we spend money on.

After I planned the meals, I wrote out exactly what I would need to buy each Friday in order to cook all those meals from that Friday night to the next Saturday. The lists were surprisingly short to me, which I felt was promising.

Now, I grant that this is a basic shopping list--dinner ingredients, plus bread, milk, eggs, and similar staples. If we run out of something like coffee or flour that we only buy once every few months, it's an extra expense, of course.

But, that being said, I've spent enough time at the grocery store to know within a dollar or so exactly what things are going to cost me if prices stay the same, and I was pretty confident I'd be able to pick most of them up for less than $40 and, several weeks, less than $30.

We put it to the test last Friday, sticking strictly (with one exception) to the shopping list. We did get coffee, too, which was $10. Counting that, our grocery bill was $38 and we have enough food to last us until this coming Friday.

And I feel good about that.

I feel less good about NaNoWriMo, because as soon as I said I'd start, our computer broke and wouldn't turn on for nearly two days, and then Dave and I both got sick, so of course I'm wildly behind and that saps my motivtion like woah. But I have started writing and I write a few pages by hand at work each day, which is a habit that's easy to get into--I speak from experience--and will be easy to continue, even if I don't make the end of November deadline. At least I'm writing.