I don’t know why, but going through blog feeds on Feedly and catching up on posts I’ve missed is one of those things that really gets me into the mood for working. There’s something about reading blog posts that makes me want to write and create posts myself.
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been a while since I’ve made a post on this blog. We’ve been busy – very busy – mostly with building Ikea furniture and grabbing odds and ends we still needed for the new flat. Still haven’t finished putting together all the Ikea furniture although we’re 7 days in, but there’s only two things left to be put together and that hasn’t been done for a good reason (we weren’t sure exactly what to do with them quite yet). I’ll been saving the Ikea talk for another post, though, one that I’ve already gotten started on, but here I’ll talk about the other household related things we’ve been up to.
A short side note – it’s funny that it’s usually the times when I take breaks from posting that I end up going back and checking out old posts, which normally leads me to feel I should’ve taken more time to document certain stages of my life – yet those are obviously the times I’m not documenting properly. I guess I can’t hold myself too accountable, if there’s a lot going on it’s hard to keep up and write about what’s happening at the same time. The best I can do is to encourage myself to post about “old news” after the matter, to make up for the fact that I couldn’t post while things were happening, and to have a record before my memories fade out some of the more noteworthy events.
And back to talking about household topics; a couple weeks back, we made our first Amazon order to the flat, and since then, have been ordering both to the flat and to our local post office for pick up. Both are great options. We order to our flat for bigger items, and our preference is to have small items delivered to the post office so we don’t have to wait around for items potentially all day (our very first Amazon package came after 9 PM!).
We’ve been finding so many amazing things at Wilko. Our local one here in town is honestly so big that it’s hard not to find some useful addition to your house. I really need to go back to pick up a few things I missed grabbing on our last visit, but I would love to wander around for a while to see what happens to be in-store that isn’t online and wasn’t in the smaller Wilko in Winton. Storage boxes – I’m eyein’ you.
We also had our first home delivery from Waitrose – and boy was that excellent. Thomas has been saying over and over that this is the perfect place to be if you have agoraphobia – you never have to leave the house with all the home delivery options, especially now that Amazon is delivering fresh produce over Amazon Pantry. He’s definitely right. The Waitrose delivery was worth its weight in gold. We buy so many Waitrose-branded products that it was good to have a huge order done, and now I no longer feel like we’ll starve if we don’t get out of the house to buy food every few days. Stocked up on soups and baked beans galore. So many cans we don’t have to carry! Very happy about that!
Waitrose has been doing a £20 off your first 5 £100 orders deal – so couple that with a number of excellent sales, and throw in the amazing 20% off your picks feature and we honestly now have a great start to a stockpile. Yes, I stockpile. We don’t just write about survival, we actually actively practice the things we write about. And it’s lovely to have the peace of mind of being well-prepared. Have always hated the feeling of running low on toilet paper, not having anything to snack on in the house, and being forced to go to the grocery store on days where the weather’s terrible just because you ran out of food. Haven’t had to deal with these feelings so much since prepping properly – and if anything ever happens to us where we physically can’t go out or need to buckle down and save money, we can easily do so off what we’ve already bought. Besides that, the deals I took advantage of mean the food I bought was a lot cheaper than it would’ve been if I bought a little of it here and there – especially thanks to that £20 off.
Stocking up and prepping my not be the norm in the UK, but I’m happy to do it even if it’s less necessary than it might feel in Canada, where I was not going to go out in the freezing cold weather every few days to pick up groceries! Hell, there, if I could’ve stayed indoors the entire winter, I probably would’ve. On top of that, when the power went out for 5 sub-zero days one winter – boy was I glad for my stockpile then.
Back to the present – we’ve now got enough stockpiled to be fine food-wise for about a month or two. I’ll probably bump that up to about 1 year’s worth of a stockpile and be very happy. Yes, if I sound crazy to you right now, I acknowledge you are likely the normal one. I firmly believe there are benefits to prepping even if no crisis happens, so I promise you I am very sane and not completely paranoid that the end of the world is going to happen tomorrow, and encourage you to just chalk down my prepping to me being different or even a bit peculiar if it helps you come to terms with my “odd” behaviour. I promise, though, doesn’t mean I’m crazy.
On to other things. To wind down, Thomas and I caught up on episodes we’d missed of Gotham, and now we’re onto Defiance. After that, we’ll likely watch the new season of Orange is the New Black, though what we really miss the most is Better Call Saul – can’t wait for September just for the shows! Stranger Things has been spoken about so often that I really think we should give it a shot, but after that, we’ll probably wait around ’til September for new episodes of shows we’d been watching, instead of starting something new. Tried to watch Mr. Robot and it really didn’t work out – man does it feed into the whole Fight Club financial-institutions-are-the-problem ethos – of which I’m not a fan. I mean really, even if you reset everyone’s debts to zero, people will be back to being indebted again in no time. Can’t just hit a button and fix the world.
Well, this turned out to be a longer post than I imagined. I’ll leave some thoughts for another day. Signing out.
Leave a Reply