Grocery shopping: the time suck continuum April 30, 2008

I was lugging the garbage out to the curb tonight (8 bags and that’s a light week for us) and thinking how mildly horrified I am by the amount of garbage we produce at my house, and also thinking that the only job I loathe more than dealing with garbage is going to the grocery store.

I keep a running list for the grocery store. We go about once a week, sometimes once every 10 days. It costs us about $125 per week, including all the household supplies, paper goods, etc.  After putting it off as many days as possible, there comes a morning when everyone woke up before 9 a.m., and we manage to get breakfast eaten and all dressed before the 2 y/o starts wanting a mid-morning snack, and off we go to My Most Despised Event of the Week. Ugh.

The grocery store here plays particularly depressing music - like the worst music of each decade. The cart gets fuller and I start cringeing, knowing that any second the 2 y/o will want me to hold her instead of riding in the seat. So then I am holding her on one hip and pulling the full cart behind me. The 5 y/o is pretty cool about the whole thing and, while she doesn’t really help, she doesn’t hinder the operation. Which is nice.

I couldn’t really say why I hate the whole ordeal so much, except that it seems that for that hour and 20 minutes it usually takes, I fall into a sludgy pit I have to trudge through, pulling an ever-heavier cart, while the music worsens by the song.  Then there’s the whole loading of the car, the getting the girls into the car, the coming home and trying to figure out whether to unload the car first and leave the girls in the car (we live on a busy street so can’t just let them wander in the front yard while I unload) or get the girls in the house and then unload the car while wondering if they are constructing a bomb in the sunroom while unattended.

My point, you ask? It’s this: if this whole experiment in increasing production at home and decreasing consumerism does nothing else but reduce the frequency and duration of shopping trips (and of garbage - see- my points tie together so prettily) then I will have succeeded.

And so tonight, after supper, when I realized we needed to finish setting up the third square-foot-garden plot for planting (www.squarefootgardening.com) and needed to run the soaker hoses to the two existing plots, and generally do a bunch of heavy lifting of dirt and dirtying of my hands, I felt my lazy gene start to kick in.

But we got out, and we worked, and the girls had fun. There was one moment where I looked over and all three other members of my little family were raking the bed, and I wanted to capture that moment forever in my heart. And it got me thinking that working in the garden, preparing it to provide food for us all summer, is infinitely better work than going to the grocery store. 

By gardening instead of consumer-ing, we have all but eliminated food miles on any food we can grow ourselves. (We’ll quibble over the food miles for the seedlings, garden hoses, and soil later -baby steps). We aren’t driving my gas guzzler to the store so we’re saving gas. There will be no packaging on the food from our garden other than the packaging God gave those veggies.  And it’s an activity that we truly can all work on together. It felt like work to me, but it sure didn’t feel like the kind of work that grocery shopping is. It looked like play as far as the girls were concerned. That was an hour outside, sharing a project with their parents, where they could get dirty and feel productive and examine tiny green tomatoes.

I love that they will at least know where their vegetables come from this summer.  I hope that even if they don’t ever materially participate in this gardening thing, they will at least grow up thinking it is what people do.

I also know this. I get overwhelmed by too many choices in the fridge, and then I get paralyzed about what to cook for supper.  Too many options. An overabundance, as usual. But if what we have that day are some fresh tomatoes and squash from the garden, then we will have cornbread and tomatoes and squash, and maybe some beans once I get into the routine of cooking a pot of pintos or red beans once a week.

So I am pinning a lot on this garden and what it will do for our family. Beyond feeding us, I hope it will change my labor from slogging through the grocery store to working outside in the fresh air & sunshine. It will give us more time each day away from electronic media. It will give us a family project.

I think the garden may be the key to the whole thing. I think my cottage starts with a garden.

If you are a gardening enthusiast or a grocery store despiser, do share.

L

Analyzing my house. Issue 1: Clutter, stuff, & overabundance. April 29, 2008

Before we get where we’re going, we gotta see what’s holding us back. What’s wrong with my house, and with my household management and practices? Clutter is going to take up this first post on house analysis. Before my house can function like a well-oiled, productive machine, I have to strip it down to the essentials and eliminate everything that is not beloved or useful.

Clutter. Not as much as there used to be, but clutter nonetheless. Clutter elimination was the first step on this long journey, and I started with that after having my first child and realizing that the more things I had to pick up or put away, the more I had to clean and maintain and work. So reducing clutter was a function of my laziness. Get rid of the clutter, reduce the work.  For motivation and inspiration, I rely on:

• www.flylady.net Flylady rules. It’s a wonderful place to start, though the personality and temperament of the site doesn’t suit everyone. For those who function well with having a little friendly housekeeping fairy telling you what to do throughout the day and keeping you on task, it’s perfect. She’s loving, kind, and can nag you without making you feel nagged.
• www.unclutterer.com Oh, how I love this site. Discovered it earlier in the year, and it’s like hanging out with the organized crowd. If you are drawn to minimalism, this is it. Even if you will never be a minimalist, this site will be a good influence on you.
• www.thehealthylivinglounge.com She’s feng shui-focused and has a great philosophical bent. Touches on a little of everything, but a good resource if you tend towards the “clutter has negative energy attached” view.

I’d like to hear what sites motivate and inspire you to pick up, weed out, donate, sell…

The inevitable link to clutter is consumerism. In fact, everything all ties together, but you gotta start somewhere. We’ll talk about consumerism ad nauseam, because it can sabotage everything we are trying to accomplish. But just a bit here: Unless we reduce household consumption, nothing will improve. So if you are starting to eliminate clutter from your life, start thinking about your consumption habits too. That’s what I’m doing. My grocery list sometimes has 50 items on it, my Walmart list 20. Why? Because of consumer habits, because as long as I stay within the budget, I tend to think I’m doing well. 

Ugh. There’s no good place to stop and start posts, because one topic just leads to another.  It’s a vicious chain linked together by bad habits that we all have. Sometimes we don’t even realize it’s a bad habit. It’s just there.  We buy Concord grape juice for the beneficial polyphenols (I think that’s the good thing about Concord grape but can’t remember).  We buy Simply Orange because it’s the best-tasting OJ I have ever had and, well, there’s vitamin C. We buy Simply Apple just because it’s so yummy. Mouthwateringly so. Then there’s mango nectar because of my obsession with all things tropical & for its smoothie-enhancing properties. There’s usually a pitcher of tea in there, and sometimes one of homemade lemonade.  Milk, of course…a few random Starbucks bottled drinks, some Ting (see tropical addiction referenced above), Mexican Cokes (kid is intolerant to corn syrup). On and on and on.

We buy these things because they are available, because we have a food budget that is reasonable, because I am as much a gourmand as a gourmet & food makes me happy, so being able to drink whatever I have a whim to drink pleases me. As long as there was no corn syrup, limited ingredients, sorta kind whole food-ish, I haven’t felt any guilt about it in the past.

But how much packaging is wasted on us (in my house)?  My kids only truly NEED water, breastmilk til they weaned, the occasional juice for a little variety and fun, milk or rice milk or almond milk for cereal, and hubby and I can’t function without our beloved tea. Instead of having 10 or 15 beverage options in our house, we are gonna reduce that down to four or five.  To me, gluttony is consuming because we can, because it’s there - not because we need it.  Fewer beverages purchased means more money saved, less packaging wasted on us, less clutter in the pantry and fridge. This is a win-win and my first attempt at curbing overabundance is to stop buying so many beverages.

Talk to me, Goose. Let me hear about it at your house.

L