A long shop

We seem to be back to the world of rain today. Yesterday was gloriously sunny. We went to do our big shop.

It's surprising how tiring & time-consuming such things can be. Our first stop was the surgery to collect our prescriptions. The second was the chemist to hand in those prescriptions. After that it was to the motor parts shops. We needed a new foot pump. The Mean Machine, my electric scooter, is getting rather flat tyres. It's not the easiest thing to put in the boot of the car to take it to a garage to get air there. Belatedly, it occurred to me I could have tried the petrol station just around the corner. The Fox would have come with me as I couldn't cope with the filling by myself & the only staff there seems to be the lone girl behind the till. It's just I never think of there as we don't often buy petrol there. It's just so much cheaper at the supermarket.

After that it was the supermarket. It was heaving. It was even difficult to park. It was market day. The market is just across the road. Unfortunately you have to pay for the car park adjoining the market whereas the first hour of parking at the supermarket is free - with the result all locals park in the supermarket car park unless they have blue badges which mean they can park free across the way.

We came out, trolley well laden. We had spent surprisingly little this time. I'm often left wondering how sometimes you can buy just a few items & it costs more than a huge of load of things.

On the way back we stopped to collect our medication at the chemist. All this had taken best part of 2 hours. It may even have been a bit longer. Still we're once more stocked up.

Today I'm still putting away. The minced beef was on offer so I ended up buying enough for several days. That's now in small bags in the freezer. There was also an offer on German meats, so there are now some bags of German smoked ham (it looks, & smells delicious) also in the freezer. The German pepperami is still in the fridge. It is well dated, end of October, so I thought I'd wait until the freezer was a bit emptier before I opened the packet & put what I didn't immediately want in the freezer, especially as the freezer is groaning at the seams. I've done the same with the cooking bacon. I'll be opening that tomorrow but by then I'll have taken out some broccoli for today's dinner & the topside of beef joint that I got at the last Farmers' Market that we will be eating tomorrow. Then there will be plenty of space for the extra bacon.

And so today the Fox is cooking. He's doing a vegetarian stir fry - mushrooms & broccoli in black bean sauce with Chinese egg noodles. He always likes the chance to get out his beloved wok. We've got a whole mix of mushrooms - oyster, shiitake, chestnut & some ordinary ones. I'm really rather looking forward to it.

But first it's my afternoon with the carer while the Fox does his course.