For the past week, Caitlin and I have been restricted from dining out in any capacity as per the requirements of our sixth task. No Thai or Wegmans lunches, no Dairy Queen blizzards, no beers at happy hour. We also could not accept food from outside sources, meaning that Paul could not get me a cup of coffee or a chai latte on any of his three hundred trips to Starbucks. Anything we ate or drank had to come from the grocery store, which meant cooking dinner at home, brown-bagging it for lunch, and snacking on pretzels, fruit leathers, and Easter candy.
This may not seem difficult to some, but considering that our entire lives are based around eating and drinking out, it required some creativity and self-restraint. Instead of going out drinking in DC last Saturday night, Caitlin and I built a campfire. Instead of heading out for lunch during work, we ate our own food in the company lunchroom and watched the news. It was a week of forced improvisation, and we were more than thrilled at 1:18pm yesterday when the week officially ended.
Notable Moment: I think the problem here was the complete and utter lack of notable moments. For an entire week, I ate the exact same thing everyday, because creating new and original meals twenty-one times was far too challenging. I had seven breakfasts of Cheerios with sliced bananas, seven lunches of shrimp salad, and seven dinners of either frozen pizza, more shrimp salad, or nothing. The monotony was overwhelming, and I don’t think I can face another bite of shrimp salad ever again in my life.
Conclusion: Despite all of my complaints, it was actually not a bad week. We saved a good bit of cash, and it was an interesting challenge to try and satiate our usual cravings with homemade options. That being said, the absolute moment the week ended, we grabbed our purses, literally ran to the car, and sped to Burapa Thai to order our usual lunch dishes.