"Hold your horses, bucko..."

My time-between-grocery-store-visits increased from 10 days (between this visit and this one) to 14 days, with a visit to Sobeys this morning.

Friday morning turned out to be a pretty good time to visit: I’ve learned that how busy the Sobeys parking lot is bears no relation to how busy the store is, so I no longer use that as a metric; instead I look for whether there’s a lineup to get in, and this morning there wasn’t.

The degree of stress that Steven commented on was very much in evidence today: we generally don’t place any demands on our fellow shoppers, and we treat it as an individual rather than a community exercise.

That’s changed now, and we need to get with the synchronized swimming; some shoppers haven’t figured this out yet, and were willfully ignoring the one-way aisle signs, engaged in extreme lollygagging, and ignoring all guidance to stay 2 m apart from everyone else. It wasn’t chaos, but it also wasn’t clockwork, and I came close, a couple of times, to pulling a “hold your horses, bucko, this is one way the other way.” But I stayed calm.

Every week I divert more of our shopping elsewhere, which is why I’ve been able to lengthen the time between the visits. I’ve been buying vegetables from Heart Beet Organics for pickup Wednesdays (and so enjoyed fresh carrots, fresh mushrooms this week), getting milk, yogurt and butter from Purity Dairy, getting a weekly delivery of meals and bread from Receiver Coffee, and, last week, I bought a side of smoked salmon from Gallants, open for takeout, so we’re good for the next couple of Saturday market simulations.

For Sunday waffles, and other baking, I’ve switched over completely from trying to keep eggs in the house to using aquafaba, a trick I learned from my vegan friends at Crafting {:} a Life last year.

It is interesting–a challenge sometimes, an opportunity other times–to be coming into my own as full-time household cook at a time when so much is changing.