Woke with a migraine this morning and opted for the staying in bed route, so it was almost 11am before I got up. I found some shoe trees to help block my slippers and it took an age to discover why they look odd. I have one slipper blocking to size M and another blocking to size S. Can I find a matching pair of trees? Of course not.
Mr L is making my head worse by making me do spreadsheets!
We are costing bulk-buy ferry tickets and seeing if we can go shopping more frequently without increasing our overheads by too much. We hope to buy one book of 50 tickets to replace the multiple books of 10 tickets that we currently buy. At the moment we go (together, with the car) roughly 8 times a year, thus using 32 tickets (i.e. 16 person/return journeys) from our books of 10 at a time. According to my spreadsheet, if I have done it right, by buying 50 tickets at a time we get to make an additional 7 person/return journeys to Kirkwall at the same cost. The other two return journeys are additional cost, but will no doubt pay for themselves by savings on the actual shopping.
None of which says very much about the benefits to health and spirits of having access to a wider range of fresh foods and more variety in our diet. Nor the benefit of not having to dash about quite so madly on the occasional car trips!
What does that mean in real terms? It means that I am looking at going to town every other week, instead of once every six to eight weeks. That’s a huge chunk of my time accounted for. Not something to look forward to really, but I shall go mad if I don’t create a little more variety in my diet soon! We shall still go together and take the car for bulk shopping every six to eight weeks, but I’ll go fortnightly or thereabouts with my little shopping trolley and bring back the things that are either unobtainable here or cost too much.
That’s an outline plan. We have to get to the end of our current ticket books first, and I have to wait and see what happens with the job interview. Clearly, if I end up working for my living, there would not be time to invest whole days in going to the supermarket.
I wish we had done the sums before now. I really hadn’t realised the extent to which this is a “no-brainer” – but then, we have only just discovered that the 50 books are not named tickets and that we can thus share them and not have to travel every week just to use them up!
We have light in the office! The new energy saving bulbs arrived this morning. We now have all 10 light sockets filled with working lamps. A nice white light it is too. We had 200w total before (not all bulbs were working), now we have 550w equivalent for 110w. We are using half the power now, for double the light. Just the bedroom and the craft room to go now, and then we’ll be fully energy-saving on the house lights.
The sock made further progress towards the heel last night, while we watched Heroes. I’m not sure how much further it will get today. I feel a bit fed up with plain socks right now.
I’m making parsnip and apple soup today, with home made bread. Maybe that will perk me up and drag me from the doldrums.