For a Change

Wow, we had a really very super quiet unlike us weekend. Seriously. But I guess they are needed every so often. And this wasn't done out of need ... but we enjoyed it anyway :)

On Friday I stayed a little later at work for drinks. The drama drama of last week was that I sorta accidentally got myself a job offer. By accidentally I mean I wasn't specifically looking ... but the company where a friend of mine works was looking for someone with my exact skills. So I thought, I've almost been here 5 years now, what's the harm in seeing what else is out there. I won't lie in the last year have definitely fluctuated about staying. So I sent thru my CV and went for an interview. Haven't done one of those in a very long time, but I guess I knocked their socks off because they pretty much told me I'd be getting an offer as I left that day. It took a while to arrive, because of the long Easter weekend, but I got in on Wednesday afternoon and had until Friday to respond.

I took it to my friends, who employ me. They were a little surprised to say the least. But they made me an offer to stay that I accepted (they matched the salary increase and promised to throw in a little more leave since that is probably my most attractive perk in a job and some extra responsibility too). It was a stressful week last week. But I'm feeling calm again today :) I think consciously deciding to stay has me looking for and reminding myself of the positives here ... writing down the pros and cons last week helped me a lot with that too. Onwards!

I picked up my passport with my 10year American Visa last week too. Big smiles :)

On Friday evening The Trucker made us an experimental dinner. Giant potato rostis with a topping of cheese, feta, cherry tomatoes, bacon and avo. It was delish and soooo filling. On Saturday morning we were up early to hit Dischem and buy more lights for my car. Can you believe last week all my LHS rear lights stopped working. Well it turns out the lights work just fine when you swap them over to the RHS. The Trucker took them all apart and checked the fuses .... no joy. Guess I'll be phoning Citroen a little later. Sigh.

We had a relaxing afternoon and went for a walk at Golden Harvest. And then headed to Cedar Square for sushi with @Toxic_Mouse and his girlf.

On Sunday morning we had a relaxing morning at home. The Trucker grabbed some croissants for breakfast from Doppio and came home to read the paper while I read my Kindle in the sunshine :)

Then, as usual, we headed off to do our weekly grocery shop. But we decided to do some investigation ... it's getting very expensive, but to be far we shop mostly at Woolies and Pick n Pay out of convenience. So we thought let's try some alternatives and price check.

Then short story is that the minimal savings we could find on a few items here and there did not outweigh the petrol we would spend driving to the alternatives.

The long story is we started at Randburg Wholesale Market. Yes, I'm a snob, I like my beautifully packaged, ripe and ready to eat Woolies fruit and veg. But we bought a few items here. The lettuce had the biggest saving, but we totally over paid for a bag of granny-smith apples. We also stopped into the Cheese Deli and Butchery to price items. The problem in, not a lot of places have low-fat stuff ...

Then we headed all the way to Food Lovers Market (Fruit and Veg City) in Weltevreden Park. We didn't end up buying a single item for our weekly shop here aside from bananas, which were significantly cheaper than Woolies or PnP. Their strawberries were also much cheaper, but didn't look like they were great quality, I saw a lot of bruising. There were a few other items that were cheaper at FLM, others were almost exactly the same or a R1 or 2 different from Woolies, not justifying the inconvenience of the drive, if you ask me. Also, I hate when they price bulk items down ...  I don't need double the number of something, it just goes off. #Sigh

So after all that we ended up right back at Woolies and PnP. I'm glad we spent the time doing this. At least now we know.

The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing. I was supposed to do some baking (Bakewell Tart) but realised after buying everything else that we were now an egg short (after our egg mayo sarmies for lunch) and I have no way of turning my almonds into ground almonds ... I really must get myself a blender type thing soon! To be honest, I had decided to and then The Trucker & I got back together and planned to move in together and I figured it was worth waiting to see what we still needed after we combined our kitchens ... but that still hasn't happened.

Will get that birthday list up soon then ;) Haha.