I Can Make It

I'm home.

It's a relief to be home. Illness aside, I think I lost weight in the hospital thanks to the very poor quality of the food. We like to complain about institutional food, but think about the challenge these purveyors of basic calories must face. Every meal must meet minimum health guidelines, calorie guidelines, sugar content limitations, and variety over a week or two.

Taste is a whole other problem. When you are preparing food for a couple thousand people in a cosmopolitan city like Calgary, you have tastebuds which range from bland and mild, to spicy hot Asian or South Asian cuisine. It makes sense that these commercial kitchen creations swerve towards bland. It's safer. You can always spice up, but you can never spice down. So it's rapid slide to the bottom of the savory pile.

Here at home I make my own food, the way I want. The trouble is that on a day like today, I don't really feel like cooking. Fortunately I have a large set of pre-made meals in the freezer. Today feels like soup, or pasta sauce, or maybe even leftover turkey and gravy. All of this, though, means some level of food preparation, and that's precisely what I don't feel like doing right now.

I have to go to Best Buy, to find out how much it will cost to fix my laptop, or if it will just have to be replaced. Either way I have a very limited budget. It's going to be a squeeze. Perhaps selling my truck sooner rather than later is a good idea. I can use the money. On the other hand I just got my GST rebate cheque and my Carbon Offset Rebate cheque. Along with the generosity from blog readers, I can probably works this out either way. I'm just going to have to be creative, run close to the edge.

This is not new to me. It's almost five years since I've had any income. Three of those were covered by my own savings. Another was covered thanks to good circumstance. The one year remaining was made possible by blog and other donations. I'm back to that again. It's a kind of weird, sad reality. I keep on living, even though it is a real struggle. And the longer I live, the more financial help I will need.

So for now, I'll go and find out about my laptop. Then, if I can still afford it, I might have sushi. If I can't afford it, there's lots of food here at home. I can make it.