Grocery impairment

[mrissa]

I have talked to you-all about my grocery impairment before, I think. It's a sad thing to be grocery impaired. It's a genetic problem I have -- or else it's environmental. It's one of those things where you look at my family and think, either way, really. My great-grandmother (Mor's Mormor) used to send my great-grandpa to the grocery store nearly daily in his retirement, but Great-Grandpa was good friends with Joe Aleck the grocer, and I am informed that this was partial cause as well as partial effect.

Still. This has reached horrific proportions. Someone from my household has gone to the grocery store every single day since we got back from California. Friday night, Saturday, yesterday, today. This is ridiculous. The grocery store is two minutes from home, so it's not a major drain on resources, but -- for heaven's sake. Friday night was just a milk run, so Saturday was a planned expedition, but then there was yesterday and today. Uff da. So I got the almonds I needed for the dinner I'd already started making, and I got raisins because somehow we were out of raisins, and I got cucumber because I had left just a stub after my lunch salad, and all this sounds reasonable, doesn't it? As though we might have thought of these things before? Which we would have, if I wasn't so grocery impaired! And I got some cheese for Mark's sandwiches, and I got strawberries so...we would...um...have strawberries...so okay, some of the stuff I ended up getting wasn't on a strict need basis.

I suppose the answer to this is to declare ourselves willing to eat company chicken without the almonds or something barbaric like that, but I would just be doing it to prove that I could, and where's the sense to that?

(Except, okay, sometimes it's good to prove you can do something if you don't know that you can. But I'm sure there was some time when we didn't go to the grocery all week. I can't tell you when, but sometime.)

It was good company chicken with rice, and it was good roasted asparagus with garlic. I am grocery impaired, not cooking impaired.

Tonight I am not writing a hundred times, "Not every fantasy story needs to be about early twentieth-century physics." But not, alas, because I don't need the reminder. Also I am letting my music player poke a story for me, and apparently what you get when you mix the Mountain Goats, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Marley is very similar to what you get when you mix Mary Shelley and the Kalevala. Or at least that's what I get. Huh. Neat.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Mixing the Mountain Goats, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Marley sounds great.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am not practiced enough in your tonal uses (or musical tastes!) to know whether this is sarcasm.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Not even remotely sarcasm. I'm baffled as to why you would suspect it was.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Because when I use italics on "great," it's almost always sarcastic. But I was mostly sure it wasn't.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I am not sure if we have ever had a Thanksgiving at my aunt's house where my uncle didn't go to the grocery store at least three times on the day itself (they know him well at the local Giant supermarket). There's usually a betting pool about this going in the car on the way down to their house.

I had always suspected this had something to do with the fact that my aunt never puts anything back in the same place twice (finding a spatula takes more time in her kitchen than you might think spatula-finding possibly could*), but I can't imagine you would put a spatula in the cupboard with the glassware, so maybe I need to re-think that connection.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Ignore random asterisk....

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Easier than random obelisks!

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Yes, and Dogmatix barks too much to be ignored as well...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Nope, I put everything back EXACTLY WHERE IT GOES in our kitchen. And while certain other parties don't always remember exactly where things go, they unload the dishwasher rarely enough that that isn't the problem. My mom and grandma do, and I suspect that g-g did, too. But still the grocery impairment rears its head.

[bradipo.livejournal.com]

You know, there are parts of the world where going to the grocery store every day is perfectly normal. In fact, it's beyond normal--it's good.

Going to the grocery store every day, you can have fresh food every day. Once you're doing that, then it's easy to pick up one or two staples along with your fresh stuff, with the result that you hardly ever need to make one of those major shopping trips where you spend a couple hundred dollars and a couple hours shopping, unloading, and putting things away.

It doesn't seem like an impairment to me.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

[nods] Just pretend you're European.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This would be reasonable if it was at all deliberate.

[brooksmoses]

Unfortunately, our local supermarket is impaired such that it usually takes about 45 minutes to go in and get even one or two staples (but not so very much more than that to get lots of things), for some reason that I've never quite determined.

Meanwhile, the nice family-owned grocery store (which is much quicker) and the fish market are impaired in that they are only on my way home if I'm driving rather than taking public transit, and are otherwise a 15-minute drive away.

But I am mostly just complaining, here.