Know those months where everything runs out? Those dire months where, some late evening after everything is closed, you find yourself forlornly gazing at the last scoop of dried red lentils and the Final Onion Half wondering what exact form breakfast will take? When you have to buy every single staple in the kitchen?
I remember when I did my first shopping trip after moving here from my parents’ house in the Terminally Rainy City. A friend helped me move, although all that came with were two backpacks, a bicycle, and panniers. We’d been travelling all day: I hadn’t been sleeping much that week, and my eyes were sticking to my eyelids in such a way as to imply that they WEREN’T going to look at anything else for a while. But CJ, bless him, hauled my forlorn ass out of the tiny basement suite and made me buy some food. One hundred and twenty (ish) dollars later, we left carrying three bags of groceries.
“It won’t always cost that much,” he promised. Didn’t cheer me any.
Anyways, he was right. It doesn’t always cost that much. Normally I can make it through a week on about $20 in grocery bills.
This month has just sucked in that respect. Not only have I replaced pretty much every major staple food in the kitchen, from oatmeal upwards, every single other goddamn cost of any kind, new glasses to chiropractic.
Of course, I probably could have done a lot of this a little earlier, when I was working more, but, hey, paradoxically, Reading Week is both a week where I’m unemployed AND the only week I have to get my shit together. Great.
On a less whiny sidenote, this is a picture of the apartment building at which I dropped MORE money on a recorder, being as I needed one because the office one was repossessed by my editor. Is it just me, or… ?
