What you buy at the store is what you will eat at home. I have tried from time to time to see if I could buy chips and “health” bars and other snacks and then go home and eat a three-course meal, and thus far I have always wound up with one hand in a snack bag and the other greasy hand on the mouse.

What you don’t buy at the store you won’t eat at home. Sometimes I open the fridge looking for fresh vegetables and they aren’t there. Sometimes I open the freezer looking for beef and all I see is chicken. I don’t know if there is something wrong with my refrigerator or what because every other place I have lived you can usually find something unexpected somewhere around the place so you can at least put a twist on whatever boring thing will be for supper. It doesn’t seem to work that way around here. Once I opened a cabinet and was suprised to find it didn’t even have any beans in it. Canned beans! Please. If you can’t find a can of beans in a pinch what are you going to do?

Maybe I should not have said that what you buy in the store is what you will eat at home. The reason I cannot find anything to eat around here is because half of the stuff I do bring home fresh–even fresh from Dad’s garden–barely even gets eaten. I have to race a half gallon of milk to its expiration date because I only use it on cereal. If I bring home one tomato and three squash, one of them will probably get a big rotten spot before I get around to it. I hate bringing home food just to throw it out. So I don’t bring home much. And then there’s nothing to eat.

I was doing pretty good for the first nine months or so. Things weren’t perfect but I was having a pretty good time getting home and throwing something together out of whatever I had on hand. I did not bring home much snack food because I knew I would just sit there and eat it, and I did not go out much because I knew the fast food didn’t really taste that good anyway.

I think I just got disenchanted with my own cooking. It’s not bad or anything, in fact it is still pretty good stuff if I get around to it, but it takes so much less gumption to slink over to the computer and stare at the glowing screen in search of meaning.

So I get into this vicious cycle where I run and grab something to eat, yes, fast food, even, because there’s nothing at home and it is far too late to go shopping and cook something. And then I eat that for supper but there’s nothing for lunch because I don’t have any leftover supper and I didn’t go shopping anyway so I go out somewhere for lunch. And then there’s nothing home for supper so even though I don’t really want to it looks like I’ll be going out for supper again . . .

I don’t really know how often I’ve been doing that. The days kind of blur together in the particulars. Mostly what I have been noticing is the way it all either works together or fails together.

Here’s the funny thing. It takes me a long time to go shopping because I dither around in the aisles worrying about the prices. But I never worry about the price when I go to the fast food chain or the vending machine. Those are exempt from frugality.

Cereal seems to be the most expensive thing in the store. It doesn’t spoil on me, but if it were inclined to spoil I’d still finish it in time because it is satisfying to crunch on. While you are crunching your mouth is convinced you are eating a stout meal, and if your belly doesn’t feel full afterward, why, it’s easy to do it again!

Now let’s ponder the similarities of cold cereal and credit, because I think there’s a brilliant simile in there somewhere but I don’t feel clever enough to winkle it out just now.