First of all, thanks for all the supportive comments on my post yesterday! It’s nice to know that my reaction to my rather indulgent night wasn’t worth getting worked up over. Seriously, you guys are awesome <3

It served as a bit of a lesson though: My body was none too pleased with me at all yesterday. You live and you learn, right?

Moving on…

yesterday was grocery day! The load:

Produce

• bananas
• clementines (5 pounds for $3!! Yup, there’s going to be a lot of those consumed over the next few weeks)
• potatoes
• frozen stirfry veggies
• broccoli
• baby carrots
• parsnips

Proteins

• raw almonds
• turkey meatloaf (I bought it from the same place in the farmer’s market I buy my favourite turkey sausages)
• cottage cheese
• egg whites
• Greek yogurt
• deli ham
• shrimp
• tempeh (definitely an impulse purchase! I haven’t had it in years, but I remember being a fan of this one)
• extra lean ground beef

Miscellaneous

• sandwich thins
• coffee whitener for the boy (even if I drank coffee, I don’t know if I’d be able to do this stuff)
• oats

Right around budget – yay!

Meal Plan

• Saturday: chicken, sweet potatoes and green beans
• Sunday: meatloaf, roasted potatoes and broccoli
• Monday: leftovers/out
• Tuesday: chicken stirfry
• Wednesday: homemade burgers and parsnip fries
• Thursday: coconut shrimp and rice
• Friday: out

I also had to pick up some stuff to deal with a pesky little problem we’re having in the apartment right now.

We’ve had mice on and off since we moved in here. But it seems to have gotten pretty bad the last little while. My neighbour just got cats, so maybe they’re scaring them all over to this side of the hallway? It’s an old house (I live in a house-turned-fourplex) so I can’t be particularly surprised that there’s some critters running around.

I’ve tried a couple more natural solutions that haven’t seemed to work. I moved anything that looked even remotely like food away from the floor, I found one of the mouse-holes behind the wall and plugged it with tinfoil, and we shoved steel wool in all the openings we could find.

Apparently, we’ve just made it more difficult, but not impossible for the little thing to get around – instead of sneaking around the kitchen, he’ll come right out into the open about 2 feet from where I’m sitting.

Yea, that shit is not acceptable.

But hopefully, the problem will be taken care of in a few days!

Jenny’s Christmas Challenge

In determining the hardest person to buy for, I think it depends on the year, really. One of my strategies with gift-shopping is to listen carefully in conversations for an off-hand remark or comment that will make a good gift in the future. For example: Around last year, my best friend mentioned that she really liked Robert Frost. So for her birthday that following August (yup, I had it filed away for that long), part of her present was a book of Robert Frost poetry. So really, it depends on who’s given me good hints or not.

I also like to do a bunch of little gifts as opposed to a big one; usually revolving around a theme. One year I drew my aunt for my family’s Secret Santa, and she had put vanilla candles on her Christmas list. So I bought her the candles…and hand lotion, and a vanilla scent bug from BBW, and pillow mist, among a bunch of other things I’m forgetting. Just seems more fun that way!

So, that’s a really long way of saying that it depends on whether or not the person has sparked a good idea for me, or I know of something that they want/like that I can build around.

Have a great day!

<— Have you ever had any critter issues?

<— Do you have a ‘strategy’ for figuring out what to give people for Christmas?