We had company over last Monday night: Matt Lambert, the director, cinematographer, and editor of the strange and sexy sci-fi web series The Fold (note: link rated R, at the least, for sexiness, and JPW, for Just Plain Weird, which gets it an additional rating of ILI, for I Like It). We talked about movies, web video stuff, and our mutual friends, The Fold’s creators, Polly and Ray, presently out in California. Having done an honest day’s work, and not having prepared anything in advance, I made us hamburgers, roasted potatoes, and a green salad. The ingredients cost $17.00, of which I ate somewhat more than a third, so I’ll set the Official Dinner Guest Decimal Multiplier at 0.4, for an Adjusted Post-Dinner Guest Personal Outlay of $6.80, which I will generously round up to a Readjusted Post-Dinner Guest Outlay, Whole Number Fetish Edition, of $7 even. I’m sure some will say that’s a lot for burgers and fries, and no doubt it is, but they did come with some excellent pickles.
Wednesday found me back at the store for laundry detergent, light bulbs, canned tomatoes, cream cheese, and more lettuce, which last item I used to make the sardine salad that I wrote about, and which first item I used to get the salad dressing out of my clothes. Whole-number-fetish total for food items: $6. Adjusted for 3/4 consumption by me, that’s $4.
Yesterday, I went back to the well one more time, for coffee, eggs, and the ingredients for a nice roast chicken and mashed potatoes, plus CSA green beans, for Missy and me to eat while we started Season 5 of The Wire. I also sprang for a fresh pound of coffee, a dozen eggs, and about five bucks worth of Asiago fresco to sate my cheese-craving. Food (and caffeine) item expenses: $30, or a fractioned-down and rounded-up $23 for big old me.
My heavily-adjusted grocery total for the week is thus $34. Add to that the $10 I spent on Saturday brunch, and my total for the week comes to $44. Which means… which means…
For what, if it’s not the first time in the history of this blog is surely the second, I made the budget for the week. Praised be hard-boiled eggs, salads, and sardines. Praised also be the excellent brisket we ate at a friend’s BBQ on Saturday night, about which I’ll have more to tell you later.
