Housewife Responsibility #2: Groceries

Today our local Hannaford's (regional division of international grocery store) reopened as a Big Y (local chain of grocery store) and grocery shopping is on my mind.

I also hate the new novel I'm attempting to write and am avoiding looking into field trips or dealing with the mysterious maggot-laden bags that I found in the basement and threw outside into the yard, so it's Blog Time.

Grocery Shopping!

I think when I was about eight or ten or so, grocery shopping was fun. You have a list and you go on a quest through the store to buy all the right items at the right prices. You get to push the items around in a big cart that you can get going and jump onto and ride down the aisle. Also, I don't think I was allowed to accompany my mother to the grocery store until I was an older child, so it carried an air of grown-upness that is always appealing when you're not a grown-up.

Sometimes, we even went to this awesome grocery store that took your bags of groceries and sent them outside for you. You'd pull your car around to the side of the building and your groceries would come out in paper bags on a conveyor belt. Then someone would help put them in the car. It was super cool.

Grocery Shopping...

Fast forward to being an adult. I am now responsible for making a list of what to buy - and I frequently don't make one. I default to buying the same foods again, and again, and again. I can always use an onion. I always drink milk. Must have Diet Coke. I become familiar with grocery store layouts, able to hunt down cooking wine and peanut butter. I start to memorize prices of items.

Hannaford has always been one of my favorites because they don't put 6000 items on sale every week or have ridiculous activities like "Mix and Match! Buy 10 of these 25 different items and get them all for $2 each!" ... I invariably wind up buying 9 items and paying full price. Grocery shopping is already complicated, and I'm always in a rush, and I have to time to fulfill quests.

I get my groceries in a slew of plastic bags that rip before I can get the groceries into my house. Some bored-looking teenager puts the cans on top of my bread and we have weird-shaped sandwiches all week. I save the plastic bags that don't rip and they fill half my hall closet.

Grocery Shopping with Things and Baby

One of the first things I did as a newly-minted housewife was organize the coupon holders that The Husband got me for my birthday. I also started keeping a notepad on the fridge where I write the items we run out of or are running low on, so I have to make fewer substitutions in recipes. I feel confident and capable.

Then I go shopping with Thing 1, Thing 2, and the Baby.

It turns out every child, including Things 1 and 2, wants to ride the cart up and down the aisles. And if they don't ride it, they try to push it and run into little old ladies or grouchy men, or hit the shelves and send food flying everywhere. They also argue -
"I want to pull the number at the deli counter!"
"I hate that kind of Pop-Tarts!"
"It's my turn to ride the cart!"
"He said I smell!"
"Why does she always get to put the onion dip in the cart!?"

Then Baby gets fed up with sitting still and starts pulling items out of the back of the cart and eating them - "No! Not the box of rice! Here, try this green onion!" - or throwing them on the floor - "Now we have to buy a bruised apple!" - and screaming when you take away the jar he was about to throw to the floor.

Oh, and those belts they put on the seats? Those do not contain a small wriggling child. He stands up in that seat faster than you can say:

"Grocery Shopping Sucks!"

It's not my favorite task, that's for sure.

But today we needed milk (like always) and muffins (like always) and also a lemon, so Baby and I went to this new Big Y and I was wandering around trying to make sense of their sales. Is the unit price of 3 Danimals Six Packs-for-$6 cheaper than the unit price in a 12-pack? Why don't they have a generic soy sauce?

Since I'm an experienced shopper, we found all the items (soy sauce is with Asian; cooking wine is in baking; rice vinegar is in the aisle labeled Vinegar), and made it through the jungle without maiming anyone or overspending.

...And then I get to the checkout and they handed me a gold coin along with a flyer explaining what you can do with a gold coin. I'm a nice person on the outside so I said nothing, but on the inside I had some not-so-nice thoughts about what the folks who run with Big Y should do with their gold coins. Now I have to keep track of gold coins on top of everything else?!

They also have a slot machine game that you can play to win a reusable bag. I did not participate.

I'm going to start sending my children in to do grocery shopping while I wait in the car reading a book. I'll just tell them it's a treasure hunt. They'll be thrilled with the gold coins and they can practice their reading and math skills.


Srsly?

Non-Green Thumbs

We've been dealing with a drought this summer, and not just in blogging (that's the one reference I'll make to the fact that I haven't posted in over two months). So I have a helpful tip for everyone who's also suffering through an extended dry spell: you can turn potatoes into water.

Apparently, all you have to do is buy a bag of potatoes - they're often on sale for a couple dollars - and put them on your basement stairs. Wait a few weeks - about three - and then voilà! Water.

I discovered this magic yesterday. Something foul was in the air. At first I blamed the cat, but his litter box was nice and tidy. Which left the potatoes. Mind you, I walk by the potatoes numerous times a day, you would think I'd have noticed that they were liquefying, but from a cursory glance, all that was visible was the presence of a few eyes, no big deal. Potatoes with eyes are still useful potatoes, so long as the eyes haven't taken over completely. But the smell did seem to be coming from the potatoes, so I decided they should go to the compost. I picked up the bag and water started pouring out of the holes.

It's a mystery to me why this is occurring - and also how the water stayed in the holey bag until I picked it up - but if you're in a severe enough drought, this seems like it could be useful.

Our drought isn't that severe, so the potatoes went in the trash.

The drought is severe enough that it almost killed our baby apple tree. Every single leaf dried up and fell off, and I was afraid that it was dead. But I lugged the bucket of water from our dehumidifier up out of the basement and dumped it on that baby tree for two weeks and it came back to life with even more leaves than before.

It failed to rain just about at all in July, so the plants are confused and blooming late. The morning glories and hostas are a month behind. Our pumpkin plants somehow miraculously survived but are also flowering late, so here we are in September with nary a pumpkin on the vines.

This after one cucumber plant came up out of the entire package (it fell victim to the drought), and two basil plants managed to come up out of two dozen seeds.

The dill was doing okay, but in the last two weeks it all shriveled up and died, I have no idea why. And that's how our first attempt at gardening has gone.

I would make a terrible farmer. Plants commit suicide when they find out I'll be taking care of them. Or, rather, failing to take care of them. The lady who owned the house before us cultivated beautiful gardens with carefully selected annuals that bloom in succession so that there are always flowers, from March through October. I've managed to kill a rose bush, a clematis, and for some reason none of the irises bloom anymore. We planted daffodils one year; none of them came up. We planted thrift; it died. I tried growing garlic and got the world's tiniest garlic ever.

It's been a bad year for indoor plants, as well. I somehow murdered my poinsettia plant, along with my last remaining Christmas cactus. The skeleton of the poinsettia is in my kitchen window, haunting me. I haven't thrown it out because I'm still hoping it comes back to life like the magical apple tree. The only plant you can trust me with is a spider plant. Those things could survive nuclear war.

Perhaps I need to try growing potatoes...

At any rate, it's a good thing we live within spitting distance of several grocery stores, because we'd all be starving if I had to grow our food. In that regard, I'm grateful to be a Modern-Day

-Real Housewife of the North Shore