Simplifying

Jan 28 2009

I’ve been trying to simplify things a bit. We all live hectic lifestyles, myself included. Lately, though, due to some personal stuff, life has been getting the best of me.

The first thing that always gets to me is cooking. It’s not that I don’t like to cook. I just don’t like the chore of cooking a proper meal every single night, after I’ve been at work all day. I dislike that so much that it affects my grocery shopping. Partly because I’ve been so overwhelmed, and partly because of the habits I developed while I was single, I got to where I was stopping at the store nearly every night after work to pick up something for dinner.

Mister pointed out to me that my methods weren’t working. We weren’t eating healthy (because half the time the “store” ended up being fast food of some sort) and despite my desire to not have any food waste, I wasn’t reducing waste or saving money. But it took me a while to see that I had to change my thinking on things. According to Mister (bear with me, I’m still learning this), I do not have to have a perfect meal plan for the week when I go grocery shopping. Nope, it’s ok not to have that. That’s what got in the way of me shopping properly. My desire for perfectionism in planning our meals kept me from doing anything at all. So this week I tried something different. I went to the store and just threw a whole bunch of stuff in the cart that looked good. I had a bit of a list to work with, since Mister wanted to show me that pot roast can be good, but other than that I just bought whatever I felt like. While the total was a shocker, Mister helped me see that I didn’t spend any more than I usually do over the course of a week. And I still have enough food and a few ideas to feed us through the weekend. I’m not sure that the stuff I bought is exactly healthy, but not a heck of a lot of it is processed, and cooking at home is a step in the right direction.

The other change I made this week was to reduce my lunch time at work. I have the choice between a 30 or 60 minute lunch, which is automatically deducted after I’ve been clocked in for 6 hours. This has 3 benefits: 1. I get to leave work 30 minutes earlier, so more me time. 2. I don’t have to use up personal time since I’ve been having to leave work early a lot lately for personal reasons, and if I do decide to make up a bit of time I don’t end up being there way past my melting point. 3. With only a 1/2 hour for lunch, I don’t have time to go out so I am forcing myself to think ahead and pack a lunch out of leftovers, saving me money and making me eat better.

I’m only day 3 into these changes, but so far I think it’s going well. The past two days at work have been pretty busy and stressful, but I’m not freaking out over it as much as I usually do. The true test will come in a couple of weeks when I usually turn into a raging hormonal bitch.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, go ahead and enjoy this amusing complaint letter that has been making the rounds.

2 Comments to “Simplifying”

# Zhu (94 comments.)on 05 Feb 2009 at 4:41 pm

Like you, it is not that I dont like cooking but everynight is becomes a chore. I usually cook for two day. I.e I make a lot of veggies (stewed or in the wok), serve half night 1 with raviolis and keep half for day 2 with rice, or fish. It motivates me to not cook from scratch all the time.
# Kirstenon 05 Feb 2009 at 7:43 pm

I need to get into a groove about that sort of thing. I did well last week, but this week has been totally shot because of The Drama. Both of us have been in serious need of comfort food! Hopefully next week will be better, because I am feeling worse for not doing a big healthy grocery shopping this week.