Today, the day I am writing this, is the first Friday that is also a full grocery day since I sat down during my vacation to figure out how to better align my weeks to reduce the burnout effects of working the long hours I do at the pace I do. I, unfortunately, did not come up with any miracle solutions, but I did have a few ideas that would hopefully reduce the stress I was feeling from week to week before my vacation WITHOUT getting takeout or delivery multiple times a week. And, hopefully, without eating garbage frozen food all the time. Or, in some cases, eating a mix of garbage frozen food and well-prepared good food. For example, I’m making myself some delicious pasta sauce this weekend but, instead of doing all the work of making chicken parmesan, I’m just buying some frozen breaded chicken patties to toss in the oven with some sauce and cheese on top. And buying ravioli and tortellini so I can have some fun variety in my meals while still only really needing to do laborious cooking once (boiling water for noodles is only slightly more difficult than making a frozen pizza). This is the goal, after all: to produce a variety of tasty and at least moderately healthy meals for less money than it would take to eat out frequently but more money than my bare-bones frozen food, pizza, and boxed meals diet that I usually turn to when I need to avoid takeout. In a different living situation (aka, with one or more roommates or a partner), it would be less difficult to make sure I got enough variety in my diet to avoid getting takeout just for a change, but I live alone and modern life isn’t made for single people to maintain a household on their own, so I’m stuck trying to make do with the time and energy I’ve got during these increasingly busy months.

I’ve tried meal prep in the past, but I’ve always run into the same issue with it: I get bored. I don’t mind eating largely the same food every day (a granola bar and banana for breakfast, a ham sandwich and some kind of chips for lunch every work day), but I need at least one meal that mixes things up a day. After all, food is one of the few joys in my life and eating the same thing multiple days in a row (even if its something I love) gets incredibly boring. I’ll usually make it through three or four days before I give up and abandon whatever I’d prepared in favor of literally anything else. Now, I don’t mind eating similar things from one week to the next, but that’s difficult to do in terms of meal prep unless you’ve got a massive freezer to keep individual servings of things or a large number of different types (or marinades) of meat set up to thaw and then cook after work. I long for the day when I can get a freezer chest for this exact purpose. I would love to make a new type of food every weekend that I can freeze and then parcel out over weeks. I love a lot of hearty, freezable semi-liquid foods (sauces, chili, stews, etc.) and enjoy a variety of meats simply baked or pan-fried (often with a variety of marinades). It’s just difficult enough to stock that kind of stuff in the bulk I’d need to keep up an interesting variety without a large dedicated freezer the likes of which you’d find as some kind of environmental storytelling in a post-apocalyptic video game.

This time, I’m trying to focus on items I can mix and match more easily, along with keeping certain things stocked that would allow me to break away from my planned meals without much fuss or additional difficulty. Which means my meal selection is a little low on non-frozen vegetables, since I can’t reliably eat those from week to week unless they’re a part of my meal prep/weekly menu, but frozen vegetables are still pretty good and I’ve got plenty of ways to occasionally incorporate more vegetables when I’m feeling the lack of fresh veggies particularly acutely. All of which will hopefully leave with me more time and energy on my week nights to rest and relax and maybe not grow cumulatively more exhausted with every passing day. That is the goal, after all: to not get more burned out with each passing week until I have to take a day off or burst into exhausted tears at my desk at work.

Aside from meal prep, I’m also ignoring my better judgment and going back to bulk purchases, ordering things online, and keeping running lists of things I need to restock well ahead of when I might need them. All of which are incredibly interconnected. I’m still not using Amazon since the bulk-purchase thing makes it easy to get free shipping from Target, but I still don’t really like ordering things to be delivered to me when I could just swing by the store on my way home after work and pick them up instead. I will exhaust myself less quickly if I order things for delivery, though. Sure, it isn’t much work to take an extra fifteen to twenty minutes out of my evening to swing by the local Target to pick things up that I ordered online, but it is still more work and I’m usually exhausted by the end of most of my work days. The thought of stopping on an errand on a night I had to work until eight or later is often enough for me to choose to go without whatever I thought I needed. So ordering things online means I can stock up ahead of when I ABSOLUTELY need to and for anything I can’t get online, I’ve got a Costco membership I can make use of every once-in-a-while so I’m not draining myself too much and can keep myself stocked enough that I only have to go once a month.

One thing I’ve thought about but haven’t done yet is hiring a cleaner. I’ve been tossing this particular idea back and forth for a long time now–months at least. I don’t really have a firm answer one way or another, though, since I’m stuck between the thoughts that hiring a cleaner will cost money and take time out of my day (probably on a weekend, if I can find a weekend cleaner, since I can’t be sure I’ll be home to let them in any other days of the week) and wanting to enjoy a clean house without having to give up a most of a day every week and a bunch more hours once a month. It’s a difficult question to answer since both sides have valid arguments for and against them and because I just don’t have the energy to really dig into that question most days. I was planning to figure it out a couple weeks ago, during the end of my staycation at the start of this past month, but that time wound up getting consumed by Computer Stuff and I haven’t had enough time or energy to figure it out since then. Maybe I’ll figure it out someday, either by finding an affordable service or by deciding it’s not worth the cost to me, but for now the question remains unanswered and my apartment gradually grows more dusty.

Regardless of what decision I wind up making about apartment cleaning, things feel much improved from how they did before my vacation. Everything is more-or-less orderly, I’ve got plans for almost everything, and parceling it all out means I shouldn’t get overwhelmed by any of it. Unless, of course, the quiet voice of doubt and anxiety in the back of my mind is correct as it whispers that this stuff isn’t actually better, only newer. It’s difficult to say, given that this is the start of a new process that will require me to spend effort to maintain when the old way I did things required no effort to keep up. I think that this will be ultimately less effort, since putting more effort into staying organized and orderly should mean it takes less effort to do things since I won’t be doing them at the last possible moment or under the most dire circumstances possible (which, to be fair, aren’t generally that dire in an objective sense, just in a subjective sense as I’m usually already at m wit’s end at that point). Only time will tell, though, which feels like an unfortunately common refrain in the conclusion of my blog posts. A true one, though. All progress takes time.