Accurate.

I entered everything I wrote this past school year into wordle. The more I look at it, the funnier it gets.

Kitty Got Groomed

He’s going to murder me in my sleep.

I feel sorry for this slighted birdie.

Happy Mama’s Day

Love you, mama.

Orion Likes Angry Bird

A Week’s Worth of Food: $45

A few weeks ago, I encountered a letter that someone posted online. It was a request for loan forgivness, addressed to the Department of Education. Fair enough. What stopped me in my tracks, however, is this tidbit under the “financial difficulty” section:

I will need to reduce my food budget from $ 150/week (which prepares a total of 8 healthy meals and two frozen/fast food meals) to $ 100, forcing me to rely heavily on pre-packaged, unhealthy foods.[2] (Should I do this, I will eventually become consistently ill and will miss time from work.)

They don’t live in New York City, either: they live in some out-of-the-way town in Louisiana.

While this claim sounded a bit ridiculous to me, it also made me very interested about my own eating and spending habits. How much do I eat in a week? How much do I spent on food in a week? Excluding, of course, my weekly dining out with friends, which I classify as entertainment and a luxury, and not an essential.

I decided to experiment at Schnucks. To be fair, Schnucks it pretty expensive as grocery stores go. But I still managed to buy my week’s worth of (pretty balanced, healthy, wholesome) food selections for under $50. All that is not pictured is a can of tomato paste (for the chili), salad dressing and cream cheese, which I already own. And look: there’s still room for treats.

In the winter my budget would probably be a little higher–perhaps $55, as I eat more meat in the winter. In the summer I hardly have a taste for it.

A Dream

Last night I dreamed that I was visiting a zoological garden. I was with two friends, whose faces I no longer remember. One tent advertised an indoors fishing lake. Inside it was dimly lit and at the shallow shores of the lake were rows of dead, rotting carp. Their bodies were grey. I kept throwing my line into the water and dragging it across the grey bodies, hoping one would still be alive, that it would twitch. I explained to my friends that when one twitched I would walk into the water and drag it out. Nothing moved and eventually we left.