I'm Giving Up Food

I've decided the only solution is to give up food.  I can't afford to buy it any more.

I rarely go shopping these days.  I have to be out of absolutely everything before I go to the store..the thrill is definitely gone!

Walking into Nugget supermarket I saw a "sale" on blueberries.  A container that amounted to about one cup of berries for "only" $4.00.  You could get two containers of blackberries, about the same amount in each container for $7.00 each.

Strawberries, which were in a slightly larger container, were $5.   I love berries.  I eat a lot of berries on cereal, in cottage cheese, and just as snacks, but I passed on the berries.  I couldn't justify the luxury of the price.

Continuing through the produce aisle, I decided to look at the price of artichokes, which Walt and I both like a lot.  $3 each.  For one artichoke.   I've seen them higher, but I wasn't about to pay $6 for two artichokes.

But it wasn't until I came to the mushrooms that I had apoplexy.   $16 (well, $15.99) for mushrooms.  These aren't fancy schmancy mushrooms either.  Just the same old mushrooms I buy whenever I want to buy mushrooms.  Safe to say there will be no risotto or sauteed mushrooms in our foreseeable future.  The other mushrooms were every so slightly less (at least they were in single digits), but still not a price that I felt I could reasonably afford.

I moved on to the meat aisle.  What had brought me to the supermarket was having nothing for dinner.  Meat?  Pfwww.  Who can afford meat?  I didn't write down the price, but I wasn't going to pay $25 for a very small roast anything. It's been so long since lamb was affordable (and I love lamb...almost as much as I love crab) that I can hardly remember what it tastes like.   Hamburger now costs per pound what I used to pay for steaks.

It's not that the prices have suddenly jumped up.  They've been going up right along, but I usually go through the store with my eyes closed.  We need the stuff, and I grab it without checking the price.  Today my eyes were open.   (Well, really it was the mushrooms that opened my eyes!)

I finished the shopping, rejecting item after item after item because I wasn't going to pay that much.  In the end I had half a shopping cart full of food and it still cost me $100.  I had given up and bought some meat -- a pound of the lowest grade ground beef, and chicken that will last us two meals.  I also will make a "clean out the freezer" soup this week.  I don't have a clue what it will taste like, but it will be hearty and healthy.

As I left the supermarket, I was thinking about what they say will be the financial implications for the little guy with the financial downgrading this damn sequester will bring.  Walt and I aren't poor.  We have enough money to buy the food we want for dinner; it's just the principle of the thing that kept me from buying more stuff.  How in the world do people who are less well off manage?

Before I went to the store, Walt and I sat in the living room and listened to Says You on the radio.  Our dogs are so frustratingly weird.   Whenever there is anything unusually "social" going on (visitors, or Walt and me sitting in the living room) they feel that their way of participating is to wrestle at our feet.  Every. time.

I got my iPad and decided to make a video of it.  Unfortunately Sheila had tired by the time I got it, but Lizzie and Polly played all the way through the end of "Says You."  Windows Movie Maker doesn't permit me to edit video any more, but it will, at least, put together a few clips and turn them into a movie, which I have added to the "Photo of the Day" block.

One of these 

days I am either going to try to reinstall Windows Movie Maker or set aside time I don't really have to learn Adobe Premier Elements, which Ned loves and which I just can't seem to wrap my head around. Yet.