Last night, I was pissed. I made soup and thought that cooking with oregano wouldn't necessitate me covering my nose and mouth with a silk scarf.
My bad. Turns out, my body doesn't like oregano any more than it likes anything else I cooked yesterday. Like onions, and curry powder, and coriander. In fact, by the end of the day, every bone in my body ached, my voice was hoarse, my throat was swollen, and I felt like i would be better off in a drugged stupor until this all went away.
Except of course that I'd react to the drugs, too, so there goes that down the toilet.
I was determined that I wouldn't let it ruin my day today, though. Because I had plans, and I was going to darn well do them. And I did - feeling like I had the flu, but I did them. So my day today went something like this...
5 am - Feed cats because the obnoxious, pushy squirts won't leave me alone. And they're loud.
5:30-7:30 am - Roast a turkey breast. Just because I feel like NOT needing to cook at some point in the next few days.
8 am - Ferociously guard turkey breast against small, bipedal intruders who resemble my children, but seem to think that eating an entire turkey breast for breakfast would be great, never mind that mother will go insane because she thought cooking early in the morning meant she might get a break someday.
8:01 am - Clean up the orgy of dishes from the night before, plus the turkey breast dishes, while supervising the 'making of smoothies' by the kids.
9 am - Clean up the orgy of smoothie dishes.
10 am - Remember that mother needs to eat, too, and make the traditional buffalo meat plus avocado plus quinoa (yeaaa, quinoa day. Again. Sigh).
10:30 am - Clean up the orgy of buffalo cooking dishes.
11 am - Drop off husband at Starbucks for studying. Head to SunFlower Market for phase one of grocery shopping- buffalo meat. The people there think I'm some sort of buffalo obsessed loony, buying 7 pounds of the stuff nearly every week. I wonder what they'd do if I said I was feeding a pet puma.
1pm - Head to AJ's, a.k.a. Foodie Land. Gawk at the huge number of nicely dressed, clean, tidy, unencumbered adults who shop there, and wonder what they do with their lives if they don't have children to watch every second of the - no, don't touch that, honey. Or that. Put that one down. - every second of the day.
2 pm - Head to grocery store number 3: Whole Foods. The black hole of pocketbooks. Send out children on expeditions to find various organic fruits and veggies. Find out the kids packed their box of snacks and left it at home so add in more food, just to feed the kids right now, to the tune of $30. Ow.
3 pm - A brief break in the food day, out in the sun at the park. Small people go crazy on the jungle gyms. A good sight today when I get to sit 20 feet away and can't hear the echo of their voices, unlike the store.
4 pm - Buy food for a sick friend and drop it off.
5 pm - Pick up husband at Starbucks and head home.
6 pm - Cook family's dinner while husband goes to another grocery store for the last four items on the list.
7 pm - Cook my dinner, finally, and eat.
8 pm - and once again: orgy of dishes.
This has become, basically, what my day is like the one day a week that I shop for groceries. Sometimes it takes longer, with more stores added, sometimes it's shorter, but it's always an entire day that revolves solely around food: making it, taking it with us, buying it, cleaning up after it.
I never realized how exhausting food could be. Grocery shopping never used to be this time consuming, this expensive, or this intense. Even going gluten free, I never expected it to be like this. And it's becoming normal. I plan out an entire day, just for acquiring food. Pretty pathetic, compared to 100 years ago, or even 100 days ago, depending on where one lives in the world.
But different for me, I'll be honest.
I'm wondering if it'll ever feel easier. I can't imagine it won't, but hopefully next time, I'll put on my scarf so that darn oregano won't get me the evening before.
Take that, oregano. I bite my thumb at thee.
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