A better week.
Day after I wrote last week's post I was surprised to receive the renewal for our van – since it was suppose to take until sometime next week to reach us. Weather has been terribly hot and we are not going anywhere, so we have not changed the window sticker yet. (Van parked on our driveway so not a problem that the old sticker is still in the window.)
And – after being told that I could not renew that prescription both by our pharmacy and our medical insurance – we received a call Monday asking why we had not picked up the prescription yet and we only had 2 more days to pick it up before it went back into stock! We went in to pick it up – I was sure that they were going to charge the full price for it – after all, it was the only insurance saying it would not pay for it yet that stopped it from being filled – and if that was that was the case – I would say to put back into stock for now. Surprise! It was charged at the usual co-payment. Not exactly sure how this happened, but it did.
When we went food shopping last week we stopped at a Wendys near the supermarket for lunch. This particular Wendys has never been the best, but it is greatly lacking right now – not sure if change of management or if we just never had lunch there before – we used to go for dinner on some Saturday nights.
How nice it was to go in the supermarket, make only one trip into it, and do our entire food shopping and not even have a problem fitting all the bags in the cart after we shopped. We have not shopped for a normal sized shopping order in over 15 months.
And then, also on Thursday, we did something else we have not done in over 15 months – we went out for dinner! Back in the normal times we would go to an Asian buffet for dinner on Friday nights. We went on Thursday night as we figured it would be a lot emptier than it would be on Friday night. Very pleased that they handed us large gloves to use when going to the food bar and masks were required for same. A number of unused serving trays on the food bars – but not sure if this is due to it being now or if this was always the case on Thursday nights, though we presume the former.
Everything we do these days continues to involve being organized. We have to remember to bring our masks (no longer required by state or local government, but often required by the various businesses we are going to - plus we feel safer with them on. I carry at least two plastic sandwich bags in my pocket when we go anywhere – we can open doors (at stores without automatic doors) etc with them on our hands instead of touching the doors with our bare hands. The Corona virus counts here may be very low and we may be fully vaccinated, but I know of too many people who will not the vaccine and feel safer not touching doors that everyone else is touching.
When food shopping to prevent needing to continuously up and down the same aisles or need to go back to the store in a day or two as we forgot something – we make sure to shop with a list. I have a strip of paper on the refrigerator for us to list items we are going to run out of – try to do this in time not to run out. Unless we are going for less than 10 or so items I write them into a computer spreadsheet. On one of our early trips into the supermarket during the pandemic I listed by type items that we might use by aisle number – though it is my numbering system – the first aisle we go to in the store I have as aisle one, the next one as aisle two and so on through the food items. After food is listed non-food items - cleaning, vitamins and such. Next on my list is refrigerated items – which involves walking back to the far end of the store, followed by meat items and lastly frozen items. As we walk through the store we can pick easily find the items we need to buy. I try to keep each section of the list to match the order in each aisle. Putting them in this list also helps as my handwriting is terrible and I can always read what I printed out – while I cannot always figure out what I hand wrote on a list. While we are a bit more comfortable walking around in the store, we don't want to be in it longer than we need to be. I am packing the cold items in different bags than the non-cold items as I am still wiping everything down with alcohol when we come home and want to make sure that I get to all the cold items quickly.
When we go out food or other shopping we have to remember to bring bags with us these days. Just as our area went into the pandemic last March, it became illegal for stores to provide plastic shopping bags and either a county or large city could impose a fee for paper bags or the stores in area which did not do so were allowed to charge up to 10 cents a bag for paper bags. Our areas does not have the fee so it is up to stores if they are going to charge and whether they charge the entire 10 cents (plus a penny a bag in sales tax) or not. Most, of course, are charging the full 10 cents. One dollar store which is location of a chain store will automatically put one's items in a paper bag and charge for it – not ask if one wants a bag, even if one is buying one item. They got me once with this. The two times we have back I quickly say that we have our own bag. What we have been going is carrying some of the old plastic shopping bags with us into stores other than when going into the supermarket for more than a couple of items when we bring double bagged paper bags with us. If the plastic shopping bags are folded down correctly I can fit 4 of them (maybe even more) in each of my two back pockets leaving my hands free until we are done shopping and I am bagging the items we bought after we ring them up. So, I have to organize our bags also. When I first read a book about organizing the author said that one does not keep bags - “Have you ever walked into a store and they did not have bags available?” I still went on keeping most of the bags we got which were normal sized or larger. Husband made the same comment to me as the author had printed and I replied “you never know” Up until this law went into effect I had been using those plastic shopping bags as free garbage bags for our bathroom and bedroom little garbage pails. I now still use them – but dump them into (upstairs) the office pail and (downstairs) the kitchen pail and put the shopping bag into the little pails to use again unless they are messy. My stash of bags that I would “never need as the stores always have them” will last us for years at the minimum, since they are being used over and over again.
What have you been doing differently to deal with all of these sorts of things this past year plus?
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
Who ever thought that going food shopping for just what one needs in the coming week would become something looked forward to.
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