Shopping

So how’s the new budget working? Not all that bad, I suppose. But not great. On Friday we’ll be two weeks into the thing. I’ve managed to stay out of Costco for that entire time, but will make a small Costco run the day after tomorrow to pick up dog meat, dog veggies, and a couple of small things for myself.

The big problem: groceries. I budgeted $300 for the month, but as of today am already up to $267. But that includes a bottle of Maker’s Mark: stupidly, I bought a small bottle for $30 rather than spending $40 at Total Wine or Costco for one that holds three times as much sauce. For $10 more, I could have bought enough whiskey to last three or four months instead of one or two.

Penny-wise and pound foolish… 🙄

And it also includes two big rolls — $26 worth — of expensive dog food. The last of these will run out on the 15th, which is the occasion for the planned Costco run.

But…$26 + $30 is only $56. If I hadn’t bought those, I still would have spent $211 of the budgeted $300, with two full weeks left to go. It’s unlikely I could stay under $300 this month, at that rate.

That is after having bought 60 pounds of produce for $10.

HowEVER…I have spent exactly NONE of the $150 budgeted for Costco this month. I’ll need a package of chicken thighs, a package of bulk pork, a package of “Tuscan” style frozen vegetables (no corn, no onions: big!), and I’d like to get a container of those wonderful Campari tomatoes and a container of six glorious golden Mexican mangoes.

Offhand I don’t recall how much the frozen veggies are — about $15, I’d guess. The giant packages of chicken and of pork? About $30 apiece…so we’re at $75…then the tomatoes and the mangoes, let’s say about ten bucks apiece for those, though I think they’re cheaper: $95 for the projected Costco run.

If I don’t set foot in a Costco between Friday and August 1, that leaves $55 to spend on food for the rest of the month. In theory.

And, in theory, the only food I should have to buy for the rest of the month is the occasional fresh produce.

When the weather cools down, I’ve GOTTA build a raised garden out in back and plant some food in it. Just some lettuce and some spinach would go a long way toward keeping me out of grocery stores.

At any rate, there are several other categories where I’ve spent nothing: incidental medical bills, Amazon,  clothing. That creates $75 of slack that could (theoretically) be spent on groceries. EXCEPT…that “incidental medical bills” is an average that includes the semiannual dentist visit, among other things. Next week I have to go in to get my teeth cleaned: that’ll be a hundred bucks. So…in reality there’s $200 p.a./12 – $17 less available (since $16.666 a month is a permanent drain on the annual amount available for living expenses): $75 – $17 + ($300-$267) = $91 left to buy groceries this month.

BUT utility bills came to $418, exceeding the budgeted $400 for summer bills by $18. So in reality I have $73 to cover food for the rest of the month.

This, apparently, is not gonna work.

 

So I was finally reduced to cleaning out the chest freezer that resides in a back room. It was due for a clean-up when the whole stupid boob thing arose. During the year of surgeries that ensued, that chore was relegated to such a back bar that it was forgotten. And since then I haven’t much given a damn about anything unrelated to staying alive from day to day without losing what remains of my mind.

But now that I’m well again — for the moment — it seems good to catch up with the 87 gerjillion jobs, chores, obligations, and minor survival tasks that have gone by the wayside. One of those was shoveling out the freezer.

Quite a job: but it’s now done, and to finish up all we’re doing right now is waiting for the thing to cool back down into the sub-zero range so we can haul the food out of the refrigerator’s freezer, where we jammed it, and put it away neatly.

It was a serendipitous juncture at which to take on this chore: just as I was thinking about whether I want to continue shopping at Costco at all, and if so, to what extent.

How so, serendipitous? Well, because this freezer, itself a Costco product, accrues Costco purchases as a closet breeds coat-hangers in the dark. Videlicet:

Whenever I buy a lifetime supply of meat — say, steaks or pork — I cut up the contents into meal-size portions and freeze them in individual packets, which go into small ziplock bags to be stored inside larger ziplock bags. Very handy.

Problem is, after the late, great gut surgery, a physician’s assistant informed me that I would never again be able to eat grilled meat, fried meat, roast meat, crisply cooked vegetables, raw vegetables, or salads. Whatever I would be able to tolerate would have to be cooked into mush, puréed, or dumped out of a can. Since I had subsisted on grilled meat, grilled veggies, and salad for quite some time, as you can imagine this bit of news rather killed my appetite.

So a great deal of food that was stashed in the freezer has just sat there for the past year or so.

Recently, though, it has come to my attention that

a) salad greens make the belly feel better, not worse;
b) grilled steak, grilled chicken, grilled fish, and grilled veggies have no ill effect;
c) I no longer give a damn one way or the other, anyway; and
d) To avoid going broke at the Costco and the grocery store, I might as well eat whatever is in the house.

Hence, the freezer-cleaning frenzy.

When I shoveled the thing out, this is what I found:

17 pieces of steak
4 hamburger patties
2.5 pounds of ground bison meat
2 gigantic bag of sea scallops
3 open packages of fish, each containing several servings
1 serving of leftover barbecued spareribs
4 packages of doves
1 pair of lamb ribs from a deconstructed rack of lamb
4 pieces of vacuum-packed yellowtail tuna

All told, these came to 43 servings of fancy protein.

This doesn’t count any of the other stuff in there: the collected bags of expensive flours donated by a choir friend; the sacks of frozen veggies; the this, that, and the other.

Since I don’t eat meat or fish every day, 43 servings amounts to at least two months’ worth of dinners. Probably more.

So…what is my freezer trying to say to me?

Quit buying food at Costco!
Moron! Do not ever spend $396 on groceries in a single month, ever again!

Seems like a fairly clear message…

LOL! Clearly, I won’t have to buy any meat except the usual cheapo dog schlock for the foreseeable future (at my age, “foreseeable” does not stretch not very far into the fog).

Have you cleaned out your freezer lately? Does it have a message for you?