strawberry oatmeal 2

STRAWBERRY OATMEAL 2

How does strawberry oatmeal tie in with “rewarding your frugality”? Easy. I came to love strawberry oatmeal, and then ran out. Which constituted a real problem which prompted this article. Okay, here I am with twenty or so boxes of strawberry oatmeal. Made of mostly oatmeal, which I hate. I'll eat it, so I don't hate it as I do cooked vegetables which I refuse to eat. If the world's hottest bikini model with huge real boobs offered to sleep with me ( cowgirl style ) if I ate her vegetarian dinner first, I would be by myself that evening.

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That is the extent of my displeasure over cooked veggies ( which were pounded down my throat under duress my entire childhood ). Oh, you poor dear, right? No. Hump you! It wasn't abuse but it sure was the perfect way to get me to never touch cooked bunny food ever again. Raw? You bet, with just a couple of exceptions like potatoes. And I don't touch broccoli or its illegitimate siblings. I don't care what I have to do to avoid them. You want me to be a dinner guest? No thanks, you vegetable cooking son of a bitch.

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So, oatmeal is no where near the train wreck, clown car wreck, slow motion car through the orphanage wreck horror show that cooked veggies are. I CAN eat it but would prefer almost anything else. Well, after a year and a half of slowly increasing inactivity and cheating on exercise in favor of writing and research, I'm starting to feel like a huge glob of crap. Not getting too fat as much as aging way beyond my years. Everything hurting, feeling like an eighty year old begging to not wake up next morning.

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I had to start exercising and more importantly, eating better. I've always eaten healthy, if you look at whole grains as healthy ( if you don't, I've heard all the arguments already, please and thank you ). But I needed to still improve the diet. Little things, like cutting down the chips to once a week instead of every day. Not taking vitamin C on an empty stomach, or drinking coffee on one. I kept seeing the oatmeal up on the office “food pantry” ( a spare shelf ). And I unearthed my BOB bag packed a decade previous and tried everything in it.

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Which included oatmeal-the kind with sugar, fake milk and fruit. Yeah, it was still perfectly edible ( along with the Top Ramen and Rice A Roni ) after sitting in the junked truck cab through summers and below zero winters. And I realized that oatmeal wasn't as horrid as I recalled, after that taste test. And just look at all those boxes of strawberry oatmeal, just waiting for me to start eating better. So I started eating oatmeal every day. I didn't LIKE it but my hatred was lessened. So, naturally, after a time I needed to go replenish what I had eaten.

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And you would think, after all the strawberry oatmeal that gets donated to the Food Bank, that nobody likes it. Yet, every time I went to buy on sale, they were usually out of strawberry. So all the other flavors I could stand ( NOT banana! ) were bought and began accumulating. I thought I was Chef Studly, finding all these cool flavors like blueberry when the Quaker brand oatmeal went on sale, but alas, that brand really tastes “off” compared to the Kroger brand, which only carries about four flavors I can eat.

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Well, the top of the “pantry” can hold up to forty boxes of oatmeal if you arrange then just right, and so I lost track of the fact I had run out of strawberry flavor. I just went through a box of apple, and I was getting sick of apple, and realized I hadn't had strawberry for awhile. I desperately started rooting around like a rabid piglet, and there was no strawberry. I had come to almost love strawberry, but only because the other flavors kind of sucked ( I have real issues with texture when eating-it isn't JUST taste that can turn me off ). This set me off on a mini-skulk.

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Here I was, eating this slop not because I wanted to but because I needed to, many foods from decades past put on the forbidden list. I'm chocking it down under the best of circumstances, and now I have to eat crappy flavors! The Humanity! I eat whole wheat microwave bread twice a day, dinner leftovers for lunch ( and there isn't a lot of variety there to begin with ), have cut back on my meat to almost nothing ( budgetary reasons-although “nothing” just means far below a pound a day ), and NOW, on top of this other deprivation I have to eat flavors of oatmeal I do NOT like, Sam I Am!

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Needless to say, I got every box of Kroger brand strawberry oatmeal they had in stock today. Now I feel much better. It isn't even as if I'm treating myself, like buying ten bags of Dorito's because they are $1.88 a bag if you buy 10. All I'm doing is giving myself a break on Sucking It Up. I'm still sucking crap through a straw, it is just occasionally a small diameter. Not to say I'll enter the apocalypse with such refined sensibilities with food. I'm not THAT spoiled to think I get an American diet post-apocalypse.

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No, I'm merely pointing out that when you self-discipline, it is okay to reward yourself slightly to encourage that discipline. To me, a better flavor of a sucky food is a deserved reward for eating the slop. If you give a kid Flintstones Flavored vitamins, the kid wants to take vitamins. Forcing horse pills tasting faintly of urine down their throats, screaming in your best drill sergeant voice about not being a maggot or a pussy, that is NOT the bit of sugar you need to make the medicine go down smoother. What harm in there is a little bribe, as long as it stays proportionate to the difficult task?

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If you just cut the $150 cable bill, that is enough. You did great. Denying yourself a $10 a month treat of Netflix ( or better yet, the $13 a month Amazon prime so you get a better selection of non-PC movies, PLUS get free shipping so you order stuff through my commission ads ) just so you can brag to your prepper buddies that “I don't watch TV-I'm too much of a stud for that”, well, that doesn't exactly reward your frugality, does it? I mean, obviously, you must enjoy TV for that example to apply, but I'm sure you take my meaning.

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Do the hard work, then give yourself a nice little dogie biscuit as a reward. Just filled a IBC tote with wheat, assuring yourself five years of emergency food? Go buy yourself a case of MRE's. Granted, the wheat was all of six hundred bucks, tote included, and the MRE's for a mere two weeks food is almost a hundred. So, yes, it is a COLOSSAL waste of money. But you earned it! It is your biscuit. Rewarded behavior is repeated, so reward yourself for doing the hard tasks with a little bit of sugar.

( .Y. )

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