First I want to report something truly amazing: I didn’t go grocery shopping the week of the election. It was so awesome! We just, you know, made do with what we had. I did run to Acme once but only spent $30, and that was for milk and a few other basics. I am going to have to try that more often. When I went last week, I spent $220, which is just a little high, and may or may not reflect the skipped order. This week, I’m going to try again to not go.

I don’t really recall what we ate, election week. Spaghetti and meatballs one day. Usually I take pictures of meals just to remind myself what we ate, but I didn’t do so that week. It was kind of a crazy week. I did eat a lot of humble pie (rim shot). I know I made chicken cutlets that ended up being dinner two nights in a row, and a lunch for me. Oh well. Last week, we ate out on Monday, husband’s idea (I’ll count it as our 11th anniversary dinner). We had chicken nuggets, homemade rice a roni, and broccoli on Tuesday, and bacon and eggs on Wednesday. Thursday night we ate out again (Friendly’s, for Aidan’s 10th birthday). Friday night, I cooked chicken breast in the Crock-Pot with salsa, and served it in corn tortillas with avocado, cheese, and sour cream. I ran out to the garden, at 6 pm in total darkness, picked some of that rogue cilantro that’s growing and mixed it in the sour cream. The kids ate the chicken, with some leftovers. 🙂

This week, I have to get ready for Thanksgiving, but I am not hosting this year, so no big deal. Avoiding going food shopping without resorting to takeout will probably take up most of my time. There is sustenance located in this house (and in the garage freezer), but I have to defrost it, peel it, marinate it, bake it, etc. It takes some doing and planning. And there’s a lot of PTA stuff going on.

Unfortunately I missed the last farmers’ market of the season for our town. Well, I was there, but just to quickly get eggs so I could bake cupcakes for Aidan’s birthday (more on his birthday later). I need to get a plan going for where I’m going to get food now. I can order meat, cheese and other stuff from Hillacres Pride and pick it up from them in town on Saturday mornings. I can go back to ordering from Winter Harvest. I think for the next few weeks though maybe I will go over to Philly to the Rittenhouse Square market. I just like picking out stuff myself.

And sometime in the last few weeks, I got my big fat eBates check, so that was nice.

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OK, so I’m going to talk about the election one more time, and that’s it for this blog. I’ll have to start a second blog just for this stuff. All I can really say is that Trump deserves the utmost scrutiny from everyone. Please, if you voted for him, don’t just say “job done” and walk away. Keep an eye on him. See if he does what you wanted him to do. What’s the number one thing I don’t like about Trump? He lies. All politicians lie, yes, yes, I know. But Trump is more in the league of “I’m going to pee on your leg and tell you it’s raining” (thanks Judge Judy). So my goals from here on out are to expose his lies and spread the word about them, and to work against laws that I don’t agree with. Should I have been doing this all along, for years and years? Yes. Sorry that I didn’t. But I am now. I don’t give a damn about Hamilton, about saying Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays, about Melania and Barron allegedly not moving to the White House. I’m watching for changes to laws and regulations and violations of protocol. And I’m not going to wring my hands over things he hasn’t done yet.

Given my interest in consumerism/nonconsumerism, one of the things I really want to get up to speed on is jobs/trade/production of goods. What are the ethical implications of resisting buying goods from China and Cambodia, like the cute pajamas my husband bought my daughter on a whim yesterday? Should we be aiming to bring manufacturing back to the United States, in some part? You know if you read this blog that I am very interested in returning the focus to “local,” for multiple reasons. Personal empowerment. Knowledge of the conditions of production. Environmental reasons. Grow your own, make your own, support local businesses, etc. But we should be thinking about the rest of the world, too. I thought this was a thought-provoking article from the Washington Post (actually an editorial). Especially this part:

“Finally, when true progressives think about trade and the world, they ought to keep in mind a statistic that President Obama cited in his final address to the U.N. General Assembly: The share of people living in extreme poverty in the world fell over the past quarter-century from 40 percent to under 10 percent. That’s an astounding achievement for human progress, unique in world history, taking place even as global population grew — and mostly thanks to the globalization of the economy. That trend is good for Americans, economically, because it gives them markets to sell into. But the decrease in human misery also should be celebrated for its own sake.”

I’m going to have ruminate on that one for a while, and I invite you to do the same.