Two comments really resonated with me, Julia: that shoe-drop feeling, and cooking! My wife and I have been cooking more, and cooking more together, which is a great deal of fun. We're trying "Hello Fresh" right now, but don't plan on continuing with it because a) too expensive, but really b) just too much packaging. We may take a shot at "Blue Apron", but I suspect we'll find the same thing. It's fun, but I can't get over the waste. We used to be a member of a local CSA, but with all our travel kept giving away so much of the produce, or it would go bad before we got a chance to prepare something with it. Honey has a habit of "shopping with good intentions" - buying things we should eat, but it being neglected in favor of convenience food. I prefer to buy tonight's ingredients when we want to cook it.
That impending footware clatter is omnipresent. We have reasonable resources, but her health is fragile and I can imagine just one incident biting deep. I had a mini-stroke 10 years ago, so I know I'm not immune, either, but I have the VA as a fallback resource to protect the family resources. I'm/We're in "transitional retirement", not working, but not getting all of our anticipated pension benefits either. That's the downside of "early retirement". We each have a State retirement to come, and I'm not getting SS for a decade, yet. In the meantime we're filling the gap with savings. The impending downturn is scary, financially.
Your comment about packaging and buying with good intentions really resonated over here.
PACKAGING!!
OMG WTAF is with the obsession with cardboard? My wife decided to replace the O-ring in our blender and she ordered the part, and this three and a half inch O-ring came to us in a cardboard box INSIDE ANOTHER cardboard box, which was filled with inflatable plastic air cushion packs...for a rubber O-ring!
We're drowning in cardboard and I finally held a brief informal family meeting over it, by summoning the bunch to the living room where they saw the pile of cardboard generated by a month's purchases. We were forced to get a second blue recycle bin due to the amount of cardboard we're dealing with.
My daughter decided that we needed to eat a more healthy diet and she took the initiative and without consulting, returned with a lot of stuff that "makes you feel good" but which no one really wanted.
And it sat in the fridge waiting to be eaten, and was ultimately thrown out. Most of it was exotic, with Korean writing, so we didn't even know what most of it was half the time.
Another meeting...are we buying stuff that signals we are doing the right thing but which NO ONE wants?
Hate to say it but online purchasing is not environmentally sustainable. Millions of trucks delivering cat litter and O-rings is not sustainable.
