Get down with the sickness January 7, 2009

Am I the only one who has crazy ass dreams when I’m fighting a fever? I’ve been running a low one the last couple of days and boy are my dreams weird as crap. Last night  it was a combination of Men In Black II (which we watched that evening- not as good as the first one) and this video game I’ve been playing called Spore. I had to save the universe by growing bigger and bigger and I didn’t know what was going to make me grow till I did it- kinda like a puzzle. The good thing was that every time I got it right a little of the pain in my stomach would go away. Yeah weird right? The other dream starred three of my long dead childhood pets who in the dream had been attacked by a neighbor’s dogs. (some dogs in a nearby city are being killed and it was on the news last night). My dad and I ran to save them and somehow they were okay. It was odd to say the least. Do you all have funky dreams when you’re running a fever?

Other than that I have been strategically planning ways to eat healthier this year. Its a very tough thing to do when you’re on a limited food budget and you’re husband wants to get the most bang for his buck. His idea of groceries is mac and cheese, ramen noodles, pop tarts, cereal and milk. Everything else is extra luxuries and while I appreciate that he’s trying to save money, I don’t appreciate that its at the cost of our health. And since we feed his brothers almost every day at lunch time to save their dad money (don’t even get me started on that) we have these things in huge amounts and have little money left to spend on other foods. Granted, Jarell is usually pretty good about keeping the lunch foods off our tab and charge it to his dad because I’m not willing to feed the whole neighborhood at our expense, but its all the same stuff all the time. Spaghetti is another staple as is chili and I’m getting sick of it. I need to figure out a way to shop better and get more for our money without living on the diet of a broke grad school student. Any suggestions there? We’re going to get a membership to Costco as a starter, but I don’t even want to think about going in that place without first knowing exactly what we need ahead of time and also how much we usually pay for it at our regular store because it doesn’t take long for those kind of places to take over your wallet. I know that with Jarell’s style of shopping we get 2 to 3 weeks worth of food for between $100 and $150, but I can’t handle eating like that any more and I know we can do better if we just try.

I need to figure out a way to plan some menus for a whole week or even several weeks, but I’ve always been terrible at that kind of stuff. I get started and then something gets messed up whether it be someone eats something that was supposed to go into another meal or I forget a key ingredient that I don’t know how to do without and its frustrating. Also a problem is that I never know when it will be dining for two or dining for 6 and even when its just 2 I don’t know if Jarell will be starving or if he won’t feel up to eating at all. Boy sometimes being a housewife is tough! When I was single, I knew that I needed to make my food budget stretch and so I would cook a week’s worth of something and eat that with some ending up in the freezer for other times and various additions, but the only meals that work like that around here are junk food.

So I guess my next goal is to dig through my old women’s world magazines and find some of the week’s worth of groceries menus in there and get to work. I guess you could even call this my New Year’s resolution. I know if I try to do the diet and exercise thing I won’t, but maybe if I can just focus on eating right first then the rest will follow.

Wish me luck folks!