Empty pantry, 10 more hours, & Lawrys

So, one of the joys of Karl's work plans changing and the both of us waking up last week and finding ourselves in our bed in South Carolina instead of Vegas (for Karl) and Texas (for me) is that our budget was royally screwed.  Dave Ramsey says that "if you're spending more than 15 minutes a week on your budget, you're doing it wrong."  Well, I'm clearly doing something wrong because I pour over our monthly budget for, like, hours.  Literally.  Anyways, all of these plan changes happened during the middle of the month/middle of a pay period which obvi is what made the situation worse.  ANNND since I had already spent hours figuring out our budget to accommodate him in Vegas, me in Texas, and nobody at our house using our utilities, my mind was too numb to fix it once plans changed... not to mention that our bank (USAA) doesn't have an actual physical establishment ANNND the Dave Ramsey plan uses primarily cash ANNND I had gotten like oooodles and ooodles of cold hard cash money out for mine and Karl's time away so here I am sitting with like handfuls of twenties AND electronically paid utility bills that are now bigger than I anticipated... ugh.  The joy.  I hadn't planned on writing any of that.

Needless to say, here we are at the end of the month and we are des.per.ate for groceries.  Yes, I could definitely go get groceries and we wouldn't suffer financially.  BUT  [have I mentioned that I am kind of an extreme person?? I am] I am bound & determined to not spend a dime over what we budgeted for groceries... even though we only budgeted for two weeks worth of groceries for this month... because we only thought we would be here for two weeks of this month.  Our pantry looks like my shelf of the pantry in college.  You know, when I studied so much I would only grocery shop once a month?  Or when I would hold out for the 6-week-away Dad's Weekend so my dad would take me to WalMart?  Empty pantry, empty fridge.  No milk, no OJ, no cereal, no breakfast food, no lunchmeat, no hotdogs, no frozen waffles, no baked beans.  I just googled "meal with only ground beef, chicken broth, ritz crackers, & a red bell pepper."  Poor Karl.  I thought of 3 good things about this situation: 1) it is forcing me to use the stuff in the pantry that has been in there for a while and that I will know to not buy again as a married person because it only gets eaten when we're in dire straits- like the ramen I had for lunch 2) I clearly have what it takes to stick to the budget 3) Lawry's seasoned salt will redeem anything, anything. Including the half-cup of 4-month-old frozen veggies I had as part of my lunch.

10 more hours until the start of a new pay period!!  I've had my grocery list made since last Sunday.  And will be shopping early enough to eat breakfast when I get home... with breakfast food.
Hannah K.C. Burton