Random stuff

[wiseheart]

I should have started counting down the days of Lent, like I did with Advent. That would have spared me the pains to come up with a subject line for 6 whole weeks! Ah well, too late now.

Today, I was on a hoarding tour. Price freezing on basic foodstuffs will end by May 1st, so I stocked up on flour, sugar, sunflower oil and coffee. Well, there is no price freezing for coffee, but it gets more expensive by the day, so when I find some for a halfway reasonable price, I'll buy it.

One of the local food shops had cold cuts on sale, so I bought some of those, too. Just enough for a couple of days, as they won't keep much longer, and the freezer is already bursting at the seams. Price freezing on chicken meat will end by May 1st, too... Not that it would mean much, but at least it will bridge us over for some time. An inflation rate of 11% is calculated for Jule or so. How wonderful - NOT!

I worked a bit on the quiet books; decided that the puny little red balls on the seal pages won't do, so I've replaced them with good-sized white ones with a colourful star pattern. I think the pages look much better that way. I also cut out some pieces for the castle puzzle page. Tomorrow there will be some Velcro work again.

And some baking; at least that's the plan. It's high time I started if I want to be done before Easter. One shouldn't disappoint the Easter Bunny, right?

I had a long phone chat with my friend Erna. I haven't talked to her for weeks. Poor (ex-)colleagues, they are so snowed over with work, they don't have the energy to hunt down some lazy retiree like me. So I have to go after them. But that's okay. I don't mind.

Comments

[meathiel]

Here the shelves with flour, sugar and oil are empty ... once again!
The stores ration the stuff ...
And inflation was 7,3% this month, this is unheard of in Germany.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

That is frightening! We haven't had any shortages yet, except on Sundays when flour mysteriously disappears from Lidl. I've been employing the strategy to buy one package of flour and sugar and one bottle of oil whenever I do the shopping. I wouldn't be able to drag home more anyway, but small steps and all that...

[manue7a.livejournal.com]

Reading about the velcro reminds me — how is Sopie doing? (that was the name, right?)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Do you mean the baby sewing machine? She's called Louise. But she's not suited to sew anything thicker than cotton cloth. I only use her for the binding stripe.

[manue7a.livejournal.com]

Oh, Louise, right! :)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Louise the Younger, to be more accurate. Louise the Older is the washing machine.
For some odd reason I never gave the vacuum cleaner a name...

[manue7a.livejournal.com]

It shall be..a boy. Louis? ;)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Nah, ours is an exclusively female household. ;)

[beauty-forashes.livejournal.com]

It's wise to stock up. No flour to be had here anymore, nor sunflower oil. I posted about the last packet of flour Chris found in the second supermarket he went to. Odd times, when finding a packet of flour is so exciting that it warrants being included in a post. LOL!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Very odd indeed! The last time we had to face food shortages was back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in Transylvania, when I was a small kid.

[beauty-forashes.livejournal.com]

We had a lot of shortages back when Covid started, but that was mainly people freaking out and hoarding like no tomorrow. Now the hoarding is going on too but the situation is a much different one, so supermarkets are rationing certain items if they're available at all.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

One of the (few) advantages of living in a big city is that you're surrounded by supermarkets. What you can't get in one, you might get in the other one. I live in one of the outer districts of the capital, but even so, there are five large supermarkets I can reach on foot, with less than twenty minutes walk. Two of them so close I won't even take the tram on the way back, loaded with stuff.

[beauty-forashes.livejournal.com]

That's the only thing I miss about the big city, the convenience of everything nearby. We have a discounter and a supermarket 12 km away, anything else we'd have at least a 3/4 hour drive. I order a lot online because of that, but even in the online supermarkets that deliver way out here, there's no flour. We'll just be frugal with what we have for now.

[elwenlj.livejournal.com]

What did we all do in the days before freezers? My government is helping out with energy bills instead of food, but competition in the supermarkets is so stiff that, although prices have risen, I don't think they're as bad as they could have been.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

In times like these I'm almost thankful for a childhood spent in not-so-poetic poverty. We've all learned to be careful with what little money we had and to be creative with the things we could get.

[lab-jazz.livejournal.com]

Price freezing on basic foodstuffs will end by May 1st

You're lucky that there was price freezing put in place even if it was temporary. I wish that they would do something like that over here. The price of food, especially fruit and vegetables is astronomical.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, fruit and veggies are insanely high over here, too. And price freezing is only for certain types of flour, sugar and sunflower oil. Oh, and chicken meat. Everything else slides upwards from day to day.

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

Our prices are very high at the grocery store. I don't know when or if they're going to retreat.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I seriously doubt it. In my experience, when there is a crisis of any sort, prices skyrocket — and stay there once the crisis is over. :(

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

I agree. When it comes to the shopping, it seems what goes up, stays up!

[noadvertising.livejournal.com]

Apparently everyone is stocking up. This time it´s sunflower oil and flour, especially in Germany! Empty shelves ahead... Fine with me, we mostly use olive oil with chilli-garlic flavour, and the oil we get from our friend´s olive garden in Italy. But here you won´t get any special offers, except if you are one of the first in the shop. People leaving the shop with 20 packages of butter- that´s sheer madness!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Fear can made people do odd things. I see it on my own actions. *sigh*

[mirasaui.livejournal.com]

Prices are high here, and with the shipping backups, it is hit or miss what will be missing on the shelves from day to day.