After breakfast and dog walk, we were on a mission: we wanted to hit the bakery at Lidl, get cranberry juice at Aldi (where it's the least expensive), and then finally stop at Kroger for distilled water, no-salt mushrooms, and onions. No need to go driving from one location to the next: the handy-dandy "supermarket shopping mall" on Floyd Road would serve us well (there's a Lidl and an Aldi going out toward Mableton, and a Food Depot, a Publix, and a Kroger coming back).

Lidl was the first stop and we lucked out. While James was stocking up at the bakery (baguette, buns, cheese buns, and dessert cookies), I ran to the back and got two gallons of skim milk, a dark chocolate bar, and some chicken drumsticks for 79¢ a pound. On the way out we also found distilled water for ten cents cheaper than Kroger, inexpensive Vidalia onions, and...tada! cranberry juice at the same price as Aldi. We didn't bring the power chair (James just limped around leaning on the grocery cart), so this was a big plus: all we needed to do then, at Kroger, was to have me run in and get the mushrooms (and I also grabbed two cucumbers and some ramen noodles). That's my favorite kind of grocery shopping: fast!

We got home not long after one, and the rest of the afternoon went by at the speed of light: I put up the groceries, made a quick salami sandwich with one of the buns, washed towels, sorted both our pills for the week, and made the bed. While I was doing the latter, I got aggravated at how dusty the headboard of the bed is. I could dust the master bedroom once a week and the spare room once a year, and at the end of the year the master would still be dustier than the spare room. I think it's the C-PAP; our bedroom in the old house was the same. I cleaned that up, and also the top of the chifforobe and vacuumed the stuffed animals on it. When I put the vacuum cleaner up I was looking forward to sitting down for a while, only to discover it was time to start dinner!

Between dinner prep steps, I worked on a project: looking into cord-cutting options.Our Dish bill is ridiculous, and we don't even have any of the premium movie channels. (Nope, we're not following Game of Thrones.) So I made a list of the channels we watch most often in a WordPerfect document and turned the list into a table with columns of checkoff blocks next to each channel. Then I went one by one through the channel lists on each of the streaming services and checked off which plan had what channels. I listed both Sling plans (Orange and Blue), PlayStation Vue Core and Elite plans, two pertinent Hulu plans (base and with the "entertainment" option), a YouTube plan, and something called Fubo. It's crazy: Playstation Vue has the best single offering of channels but then doesn't carry the History Channel (which James wants for Forged in Fire). Sling Blue carries Discovery Channel (which we want for Alaska: the Last Frontier) and History Channel, but neither Sling plan has Cooking Channel (Good Eats repeats) and DIY (I love Rehab Addict and we both like Mike Holmes), nor Animal Planet, Smithsonian, and TCM. What would work for us best to get all the channels we like would be the Core PlayStation Vue plan and the base Hulu plan together—but that adds up to only $10 less than we pay Dish for our programming now with more channels. Plus while all of the plans but Sling have local channels, none of them carry PBS! I even checked the Dish Flex pack. That would be only $20 less than we pay now, and we'd lose a bunch of channels we love, like NatGeoWild, Science, DIY, and Cooking. If we could only get rid of those dozens of tiresome sports channels and the music channels we never listen to except at Christmas, and then not have to pay for them! They are more than half of our subscription!


We had the chicken drumsticks, of course, baked in cream of chicken with herbs soup and some plum balsamic vinegar. It gave the drumsticks a nice rich taste. James had his with rice and I had mine with baguette slices (in no universe would I choose rice over fresh French or Italian bread). Watched the news and then it was time for Call the Midwife, served with a Perry Mason chaser.

Labels: food, housework, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:23:00 PM

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