continued....
Over stockpiling turns out to be really working out well for us. But that too is situational. I think a lot of it might have gone stale if we hadn't been unemployed this long, because we might not have gotten around to using it, which would have been pretty tragic.
We need to diversify our stockpile a lot more when we do it again though. Loss leaders rule, but there's a point where we're just sick of eating the same dang thing week after week, no matter how much you like it.
It occurred to me that when we're Ok for money we tend to go out to eat at restaurants where we can get things that we don't normally make at home, like greek food, or chinese. Or, I'll have an idea for dinner and go pick up the two extra ingredients that aren't on my normal shopping list. Now that we aren't doing those things, our meals are getting to be pretty boring.
Yeah, I thought a couple costco packs would be enough, but trust me, buy more toilet paper..'nuff said.
Surprisingly, all that larking about in the first six weeks has really worked out pretty well. By now I was sure I'd be hanging my head in shame for having been so frivolous with our money early on.
But instead, it delayed the desperate horrible feeling we tend to get when he's laid off for far longer than we were actually doing it.
He'd worked for nearly two years straight without longer than a week off, so he was really ready to decompress and it was super nice to feel like we were actually having a vacation together. And it eased him into the new "slacker schedule" in a fun way, which sort of kept the "moping around" from happening.
And by the time he was getting antsy.. he was already used to the new schedule so it wasn't such a huge transition from 6 days a week, 10 hour days to zero days per week, zero hours. Much nicer to live with when it's suddenly 24/7 time together.
And after the 6 weeks of "vacation" my construction man was more than ready to tackle all the little chores that had been piling up over the last couple of years. Instead of it being a "honey-do" list, it was something we enjoyed doing together and it gave him something to focus on besides not having a job. That lasted another 6 weeks or so.
Eventually we ran out of projects to do, and more importantly, ran out of stored up supplies to do them with. It's been about 4 weeks now, and as I mentioned last week, he's really starting to feel the strain. Solution.. stockpile more project supplies next time?
So out of the 16 weeks or so that we've been together 24/7 and he's been unemployed.. we were really HAPPY for about 14 of those weeks. Not too shabby!