Various Happenstances of Seth

January 29, 2006

   I'm not very good at shopping. This fact was driven home to me by my experience today, when I decided I needed to go shopping. I had little food in the house, and the fridge was practically bare aside from the snakemeat I'd recently purchased. So, off I went to the supermarket, with two simple things in mind that I needed to buy: 1) Ingredients that I could use to cook the snake. 2) Frozen vegetables.

   Of course, when I got to the supermarket, I got distracted by the sales. Butter was on sale, and you always need more butter*, so I bought 12 sticks of butter. I needed some wine and a few other things for the snake, so I bought those. And then tortilla shells were on sale, so I bought a bunch so I could make lots of burritos for work to pay off food karma. I walked home with my bags full of food, and arrived to realize that I'd failed to buy the frozen vegetables. Also, as my housemate pointed out to me, tortilla shells weren't very useful with no filling.

   So, back I walked to the supermarket, with a mission to buy two things: 1) Burrito fillings. 2) Frozen vegetables. Black beans and kidney beans weren't on sale, so I only got a can of each, but refried beans were on sale, so I got four. I was buying a few cans of Mexican beans for good measure, when I noticed a buy one get one free sale on salsa. And near the salsa was soup that was also on sale. After acquiring all these sale items and picking up some cheese, I was confident that my burritos had all the ingredients to be delicious.

   I was halfway home when I realized that I had totally forgotten to buy the vegetables. And what the heck, it was a nice day out. So I walked back to the supermarket carrying my little canvas bag** with only two goals in mind: 1) Maybe get more soup on sale. 2) Frozen vegetables, dammit.

   I almost left after stocking my basket with soup and one frozen meal that was next to the frozen vegetable section, but thankfully recalled in time. By the time I had finally gotten home, I'd spent nearly two and a half hours and $72, but I finally had burrito fixins, frozen vegetables, and soup. By then it was nearly time for dinner, and for some reason, I wasn't in the mood for soup, vegetables, or burritos. I decided to make stuffing from a box, which was pretty tasty but lacking meat. I added some shrimp. I suppose it might have gone better with turkey, but I was definitely not going shopping again.

Unhappy Valentine's Day -->

<-- Stop. Hammer Time!

Blog Home

*No, really, you do. Go buy more butter. Now.

**The baggers seemed unused to the idea of non-disposable bags. The first one put some stuff in there but most in plastic bags. The second one I had handed a bag right away, but she had put everything in plastic bags anyway. She seemed apologetic as we put all the plastic bags into my canvas bag, so when I went back the third time, I made sure to pick her register again and told her that I came back to give her another chance.

All work on these pages is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first.